


The Good in You (the Bad in Me)

by blue_wonderer



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: AU: Early Meeting, BAMF Lisa Snart, BAMF Puppy Barry Allen, Barry and Lisa are bffs, First Dates, First Kiss, Human Disaster Barry Allen, M/M, Mick just wants fire damn it, Pre-Powers, Puppies, a lot of hand waving of science and crime and other technicalities, coldflash - Freeform, hinted ptsd, sort of because Barry doesn't know it's a date
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/blue_wonderer
Summary: Before Starling and before the particle accelerator, Barry meets Lisa and Leonard Snart.In which Barry makes some unexpected friends, inadvertently launches a promising criminal career by accidentally starting a few (literal) fires, and maybe starts to fall for a certain overdramatic thief.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was a one-shot, but now it's going to be multi-chapter. :D

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which assistant CSI Barry Allen steals a car, burns down a building, and launches an epic rescue mission alongside alleged criminal Lisa Snart.

There’s a beautiful woman standing behind the CCPD. 

Barry practically trips on her, attention on his phone, thumb scrolling through the emerging news stories on Starling City’s vigilante. He’s late but he’s not in a particular hurry because he doesn’t want to spill his coffee by running and also because he doesn’t have to worry about Captain Singh, who is in a Very Important Meeting at the courthouse until at least noon. 

And then there’s a person in his path and he squawks, drops his phone, pirouettes to the right to avoid her and nearly falls on his face. Coffee sloshes up through the slit in the plastic lid, spilling on his hand and shirt sleeve. He opens his mouth to gush an apology, heat rising in his cheeks as he takes in her long hair, her expensive jacket, and her tip-tilted eyes made even more exotic by her eye makeup. Barry has a good memory, and he read through Leonard Snart’s files just two months ago following an art theft investigation, so he thinks he might recognize this woman from some old photos in the file. 

She’s frozen where she stands, knuckles white at her sides. She doesn’t even look like she’s breathing. 

“Lisa,” he says, quietly and meekly, suddenly very sure the beautiful woman would take wild flight if he startles her. 

He doesn’t once consider that it would probably be best if she were to leave. 

She blinks, pretty lips parting with a breath, eyes suddenly very bright in a way that makes Barry avert his. 

“How do you know my name?” She asks, tremulous, before taking in Barry’s twiggy arms and his inside out cardigan and his phone on the ground and coffee staining his shirt. She smirks, an upturn of the corner of her lips, and her face smoothes. 

Barry assumes she’s realized that she could probably break Barry in half if she wanted. Or, at least, trip him on his own feet and run away well before Barry could coordinate enough to get back up. 

“Just a guess,” he confesses. There is no concrete evidence that suggests Lisa’s involvement with Leonard Snart’s recent museum heist. Lacking substantial evidence, Snart himself is only a suspect. But, based on what little evidence there is, Barry is inclined to agree with Joe’s instinct about Snart’s involvement, and has himself found enough at the scene to suggest the touch of an accomplice that is considerably cleaner and more delicate than that of Snart’s sometimes-partner Mick Rory. “What are you doing here?”

Her micro-expressions change so fast Barry can barely keep up. In response to such a question, Joe and Captain Singh’s eyes might’ve squinted suspiciously, Iris’s lips would have pursed in cagey ire. Lisa does none of these things, completely hides her suspicion with suddenly half-lidded and sultry eyes and a tilt of her head so she’s looking at Barry through darkened lashes. Barry admires the cunning of the simple expression at the same time he allows it to electrify his skin. He swallows, nervous. 

“Must be a badge, then,” she says with a flirty smirk while she clasps her hands behind her back. The motion makes her breasts gently swell into Barry’s awareness. 

Very distantly, Barry suspects that there is a gun in the waistband of her jeans. Her hands behind her back positions them closer to the weapon while also distracting Barry. But his gut clenches at the way her shirt curves along the roundness of her chest even while his heart stutters at the vulnerable tilt of her head. 

Barry drops his coffee and throws his hands up in the universal sign of surrender. 

He suspects the gesture is more to get her to stop whatever she’s doing with her—yeah—than to ward her off from grabbing her gun and poetically ending Barry in the alley behind the police department where he works. 

“I’m a laminate,” he blurts out. “Not literally. Or even metaphorically? It just is. I mean, I have a laminate. Not a badge. I’m with CSI. It comes with a lanyard. The, uh—laminate, that is.” He cracks a grin, bounces on his toes, and hopes his inside-out shirt makes him look adorable and not deranged. 

Lisa Snart relaxes her arms at her sides, the demure posture and alluring gaze gone from one breath to the next. Barry lowers his hands and fiddles with the hem of his cardigan in order to quell the urge to applaud her performance. 

“So,” Barry says, trailing off, confused, body leaning towards the precinct because Captain Singh may be gone but Joe’s still there and he really shouldn’t be any later than he already is. Barry’s not sure he can handle the Joe’s Disappointed in Who You Are as a Person Face™ today. He’s not sure anyone can handle that face. 

“I need help,” Lisa says around a scowl, voice strained like she’s choking on bile. “And I can’t find anyone who would—I can’t find anyone I trust. So, I came to the police because that’s what you say you do, right? You _say_ you help people, but…” 

Barry nods, remembers files on Lewis Snart he read a couple of months ago, remembers being eleven and screaming and _screaming_ in the middle of the bullpen, _“Give me back my dad, give me back my dad, he didn’t do it, you have to believe me, don’t take him away.”_ He knows what Lisa doesn’t say, why she’s white-knuckled with rage and terror. He knows and may, to some degree, even understand. 

“Tell me.” 

*

Barry and Lisa huddle in an alley half a block away from the bank. Lisa’s leaning just inside the mouth of the alley as the lookout, her dark clothes allowing her to melt eerily into the shadows. Barry’s on his hands and knees, analyzing the scene where Lisa was separated from her brother. 

His lab kit’s with him—he’d thought he’d need it but balked at retrieving it from his lab without a reason in the view of the whole precinct. (“I’m a thief,” Lisa had said with a smirk, and had the kit in Barry’s arms with no one the wiser in ten minutes flat. “Now, find my brother.”)

“Ugh,” Barry grumbles, waving vaguely to the dirty alley and to the sounds of an active crime scene half a block away and to his phone that’s ringing silently with Joe’s face grinning on the screen. His foster dad is probably calling to tell Barry to get his ass to the crime scene or _Singh really will fire you and then kill you and I’m not kidding, Barry, he’d get away with it because our best goddamned CSI will be too dead to prove he did it._

“Ugh,” Barry says again with another flopping hand motion to encompass the chaos that became his Tuesday. 

In the dim light of the alley, Lisa Snart looks deeply unimpressed. Barry double checks the tire tread he found and runs it against the database from his laptop. Then, hesitating, he decides to hack into the cameras that are across the street. 

He also decides not to examine the fact that he hesitates in hacking because he’s unpracticed and might leave evidence, might leave a trail that will come back to him. Not because it’s against the law. If Barry was in the business of self-analysis he probably wouldn’t be a CSI. He analyzes other people’s shit, not his own. 

“Yeah, well,” Barry huffs out loud. “Can’t see worth a damn in here, but can’t start waving around a flashlight because, oh yeah, _you robbed a bank six hours ago._ ” 

Lisa preens. 

“And this alley isn’t sterile for these tests—And I’m going to get fired or executed or _grounded_ —”

Out of the corner of Barry’s eye, Lisa crosses her arms and resumes her unimpressed stare. 

“Which shouldn’t be possible because I’m twenty-three years old and I don’t even live with him anymore but I’ve learned not to underestimate Joe because grounding is probably part of his goddamned superpowers, along with his Disappointed in Barry’s Life Choices™ dad face and—OK," he says suddenly and his change in tone makes Lisa push off the alley wall with a hard expression. "I think I know what happened, and I think I can track them.” 

* 

“This is so cliche—you know, statistically, more kidnappings and murders take place in… Wow. That’s a really scary face.” 

“My brother is not _dead_ , asshole.” 

“What? No. Of course not.” At least, Barry really hoped not. Mostly because he’s pretty sure Lisa would blame _him_ , but also because he’s spilled his morning coffee, skipped work, stolen equipment from a police precinct, and missed lunch _and_ dinner. He’s clearly invested at this point. And also kind of hungry. “I was just saying that an abandoned warehouse near the docks is _ridiculous_. The area is not as abandoned as you think. There could be a ton of witnesses.” He pauses and winces. “Which means that there will be people who see _us_ ,” he hisses, ducking further behind the stack of pallets they’re hiding behind. 

“ _Shut up,_ Allen.” 

“It’s just, if there are witnesses, the Captain is going to know that I skipped work. He’s really mean.” 

Lisa makes a curious noise in the back of her throat that has a distinct homicidal tone to it. Barry blinks. “Hey. Did you know that this is a rumored execution ground for the Santini Family?” 

Lisa finally looks over her shoulder to give him a deadpan look. Barry pales. “Oh my God,” he breathes. “What the fuck am I doing here?!” He despairs to the world at large. 

“You’re just doing your civic duty. Now _shut up and let me think or I swear to God._ ” 

“My civic duty is collecting nail clippings and testing carpet fibers,” Barry mumbles defiantly. 

“There’s a side door. I think there’s only three guys.” 

_“Only three armed mobster guys.”_

“Look, you just be ready with the car—" 

“—with the _stolen_ car—”

“—at this side of the warehouse. More cover over here.”

“Oh God, are we _expecting_ to be shot at?”

“Barry—please.”

“Yeah… yeah, Lisa. I’m _here_. I might die or you might, I don’t know, kill me because I saw your face or something. But I’m _here_ and I’ll drive the freaking getaway car that we stole from that really nice old lady.”

Her eyes, very briefly, adopt a sort of misty sheen to them. “I believe you.” She visibly swallows before checking her gun. Barry puts a hand over hers.

“Listen, no killing. Not if you can help it.”

She glares at him. “Look, it’s me against three thugs. They hurt my brother.”

“I know. But, look. No one—” he breaks off, because that’s not really a moral debate for this time and place. “Dead bodies _talk_ , Lisa, in a way that injured-but-alive mobsters _don’t_. Dead bodies are incriminating. You’d get your brother only to end up in jail.”

Her smirk is watery at best. “Jail wouldn’t hold us for long,” she tries to say airily, but she nods. “I—I have to get him out. But I’ll try, if I can.” She hands him the keys and then slinks into the shadows, disappearing in seconds.

Barry gets in the car and waits. Seconds stretch by. Two minutes. Five. Six. Eight. He doesn’t hear gun shots, there’s no movement.

He should go home. He should leave Central City. He should call Joe and the entirety of the CCPD.

He wonders if Lisa can wait that long.

Sick with fear, he casts about the car for _anything_. Preferably a neon sign delineating “What Barry Allen Should Do Next”.

And then he sees his lab kit tucked under the back seat and his heart sinks because he knows with sudden clarity that he is about to do something incredibly stupid.

*

Barry’s amazed that he hasn’t tripped and thus killed himself or given away his position (which is the same as killing himself, just with maybe more torture and cement shoes thrown in the mix). He’s also really surprised he doesn’t run straight into someone guarding the entrance—which he only considers a possibility _after_ he barges into said entrance.

He finds Lisa and her brother easily enough. One guy has Lisa on her knees, pulling her hair, and is obviously bad-guy-monologuing about revenge and cement shoes. Lisa’s face is turned away from him but Barry sees her brother—a little older than he expected, but that could be the blood and the grime and the torture. Ugh.

There are also four guys instead of Lisa’s estimated three. Which is probably how Lisa ended up like this.

Barry doesn’t dare breathe or move. He’s quick enough on his feet but he’s hopelessly graceless, and his knees and hands are shaking so badly he doesn’t trust any of his fine motor skills.

There’s an explosion somewhere else in the warehouse—oh good, that worked—and everyone in the room freezes. One guy, the one who was monologuing and thus probably the leader of these shenanigans, waves a gun to clearly threaten the others into checking out the noise.

The remaining three look at each other and play _two freaking rounds of rock, paper, scissors_ —which, fair, Barry wouldn’t want to voluntarily go check out a mysterious explosion, either. He chokes on a terrified, hysterical laugh as the two losers of the game cautiously jog towards the other end of the warehouse.

So, that worked. Good. He guesses. Oh God.

There’s still two more guys, though. He supposes it was really idealistic of him to hope that they would all go investigate the explosion. And if Barry doesn’t move fast the other two guys will return and _he will be freakin’ murdered_.

So he takes a breath, grips the last two vials of chemicals, and tosses them to the other side of the room for another, smaller, explosion and maybe some smoke for cover.

Except Barry’s never really been good at baseball and his hands are shaking really bad and so instead of arching awesomely to the other side of the room, the delicate vials of deadly and explosive chemicals bounce off of the stacks of boxes and moldy tarp he’s hiding behind and _shatter on the floor three feet beside him_. The explosion is more of a loud hiss. Barry dives out of the way and, wow, that worked crazy awesome fast for a smoke screen, oh good, except for now Barry’s eyes are burning and he’s choking on smoke and—

Turns out cardboard and tarp catch fire really, really fast with that particular combination of chemical accelerants.

He crawls to his feet and tries to run from around the boxes and maybe toward Lisa and maybe towards _the fuck outta here_ , he’s not sure yet, when he collides into a really big and really hard chest. The guy curses as Barry’s stumbling momentum takes them both down and Barry hears a gun clatter to his right. The gun freaks him out more than the fire and all of a sudden he’s trying to scrabble away from the scary big mafia thug while babbling, “Oh God, ohGodohGod, I will never be late again, I swear, I swear, please don’t kill me.” The guy curses gutturally and grasps at him.

“C’mon, right for the strangulation?!” Barry chokes out, squeezing his eyes shut because he can’t see anyway. And, OK, Barry is the first to admit that he can’t punch worth a damn. But he’s scrappy as hell and he’s got really pointy elbows. And also he’s freaking terrified.

A veritable eternity later the guy is moaning around his ribs, spitting out a couple of teeth, and trying to crawl away from the fire and he’s going, “Oh my God, you bit me you little bitch, _you bit me_.”

Barry gags around the copper taste in his mouth and tries not to think about all of the diseases that are transmissible by blood (at least thirteen he can immediately name, all of them horrible).

“Lisa!” He calls, running toward where he thinks he last saw her and, holy crap. Wow. The fire… is climbing up the warehouse wall. _That_ he can see easily enough through all the smoke.

 _“Barry?!”_ Lisa calls from somewhere in front of him.

Barry coughs a response and promptly trips over another body. Oh, good. This one is also still alive. And conscious and also trying to crawl away from the _out-of-control fire Barry freakin’ Allen created_.

“Is that a stiletto in his thigh?” He calls in fascinated horror.

“Grab it for me, will you?” Lisa calls back. “And then help me.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing this whole day,” he mutters because she says it like he’s been sitting around on his thumbs. He tries not to gag again as he pulls the shoe from the back of the guy’s thigh. Thankfully, the roar of the fire is too load to hear any squelching. “Sorry, man. You should—that’s going to get infected.” The guy groans and continues crawling away and Barry pats him awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Help!” Lisa shouts again.

“Right, right! Sorry! Hey—are you okay?” But it comes out between a lot of coughing. He almost stumbles onto Lisa, who’s crouched down and trying to get her brother’s arms over her shoulders. He thinks. The smoke is blackening and he can’t exactly see them.

“Fine until one of those morons lit up our closest exit,” Snart’s voice drawls about three inches away from Barry’s face.

“Y-yeah,” Barry swallows. “That… moron.”

 _“Oh my God it was you.”_ Lisa hisses.

“What? No. Of course not—didn’t you say you needed help?” He squeaks because, yeah. He’s only ever examined a fire’s path _after_ it’s been extinguished, so he’s not too sure, but if they stay where they are they’re going to die in the next couple of minutes.

“Yes. Carry Lenny. I’ll try to get us out of here.”

“Carry—have you even seen my arms?” Barry huffs out incredulously but reaches and grabs for Snart. Barry’s already burning lungs constrict at the move, but he’s got the man’s shoulder and arm slung around his neck, his own shoulder leveraging underneath Snart’s upper ribs. The guy is unsteady and the roar of the fire does little to muffle the cursing and gasps of pain in Barry’s ear.

“Sorry.”

“Not as much as you will be if we can’t get around that fire,” Snart responds in a way that makes Barry infinitely more afraid of whatever he will do than he is of burning alive.

“Y-yeah. That’s—fair. Wait—no! Lisa! Not that—not that way.”

“Are you kidding me?” She says, stopping anyway, but that’s mostly to cough painfully. “That’s the closest way out.”

“I know, but come this way,” he takes a right.

“That’s closer to the fire, Barry!”

“I know—I know, but that’s—” he breaks off into an agonizing cough and he thinks Snart is the one holding _him_ up as he struggles through it. “But the other way is right on the path, we’ll never beat it. We have to go this way—” he’s dragging Snart with him again, shamelessly using him as bait to lure Lisa away. “And we have to hurry or we won’t beat it this way either.”

Snart shouts for his sister and the anxiety in his voice seems too private to listen to, somehow. She curses and then puts herself under Snart’s other arm. They stumble together, but it’s faster. They’re blinded by smoke and flame, but Barry remembers approximately where he saw the window earlier from outside, and heads toward it.

"Holy shit,” Lisa wheezes when the fire seems to jump and leap and completely consume the door they were first headed for. Behind them, the flames have climbed the wall and reached the roof and there is a horrible, grinding crash. Barry really, really hopes that the mob guys got out, too.

They reach the window, some panes already broken, but Lisa picks up something and rams it several times to break the rest of the glass.

“Put your jacket on the bottom!” Barry calls. “Don’t get cut.” Mostly because he doesn’t want her to be hurt but also because he’s not sure the fire will reach here before the fire department comes, and he doesn’t want to leave behind DNA—especially _his_. “You first, Lisa.”

She scrambles over, a shadow in black smoke haloed by the setting sun. Snart is harder because Barry can’t breathe and because Lisa can’t support all of his weight from below. They end up falling on each other and are struggling to get up when Barry falls next to them, Lisa’s jacket and shoe clutched in his hands.

*

It’s way more traffic and more of a chance to be spotted by witnesses, but Barry gets them on a busy city road just as emergency responders careen toward the warehouse from five streets over. Then he quickly gets on a side street and another and another, getting away from traffic cams before they pick up a known criminal curled up in the back of an old lady’s stolen car driven by a rogue CSI and a pretty woman with a bloodied face. He gets them on a backroad out of the city, circles the city, and finally stops on the edges of Central at the complete opposite end of where they were on the docks.

“Holy shit. Holy shit. Shit shit shit.” He breathes when he stops.

It’s been about forty-five minutes now, but Lisa’s still breathing hard beside him. Her brother’s unconscious in the back seat. Barry takes a deep breath and turns around to see the damage.

“Is he OK?” Lisa asks in an uncharacteristically small voice.

Barry’s no nurse, but he renews his first aid certification annually, and he’s even had to use it a few times before. He checks for bumps to Snart’s head that could cause cranial bleeding, checks his air passage ways and breathing, lifts his shirt and checks the severity of the wounds or signs of internal bleeding. There are bruises and cuts, Snart’s nose was clearly broken, and there are fingernails missing from his right hand (ew, mobster guys, just ew).

“I think he’s OK. There’s some very slight swelling on his head—he might be unconscious from a mild concussion or he’s passed out from fatigue and smoke inhalation.”

Lisa’s eyes are very, very wide.

“You need to seek medical help as soon as you can, to make sure both of your lungs are OK and to make sure these don’t get infected.” He gestures to Snart’s fingers and gashes on his side. “Because, ew, warehouse. But, Lisa—Lisa, I don’t have a medical degree or anything, but I can’t see anything that is immediately alarming. I think he’s going to be OK.”

And then Lisa Snart kisses him. Tongue and everything. Barry politely doesn’t comment on the tears running down her cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> This, somehow, actually started because I saw this post on tumblr talking about how they wished there was a ColdFlash fic out there where Barry and Len were friends first before they fell in love. I sat down to write that and this... happened instead. I suppose it _could_ be the start of a beautiful friendship-turned-romance, but it seems like Barry ended up being better bros with Lisa.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks after the warehouse, Barry wakes up to Leonard Snart in his apartment. Barry issues an intriguing challenge to the criminal, and Snart proves surprisingly adept at first aid.

“Didya hear about that arson case?” Joe asks in greeting the next morning. 

“What arson case?” Barry mumbles out of the side of his mouth, only half-listening and way more interested in focusing his microscope in on his sample. 

“The one at the docks, used to be owned by—Barry, it’s been all over the news. How do you _not_ know about it? Pretty high-profile because it’s in rumored Santini territory.” 

Barry chokes on air. 

“You OK, Barr?” Joe asks, giving a hard, fatherly slap to Barry’s back. 

“Yeah,” Barry winces, trying to play off his hyperventilation as an impromptu asthma attack. “Great, just got—swallowed wrong.” _Don’t you dare look up at Joe’s face,_ he warns himself viciously. _All it will take is one look and he’ll_ know, _so don’t you dare look Joe West in the eyes, self._

“Anyway, it didn’t end up being my case. Tried to get Singh to let you go down and take a look, but he’s pretty miffed about yesterday.” 

“I had food poisoning, Joe. It’s not like I skipped out on work on purpose and used food poisoning as a lame excuse.” _Shut up! What are you doing, you moron,_ he thinks in horror. _You have zero chill!_

“Well _I_ know that—sure you’re feeling better?” Joe asks, peering at Barry’s suddenly sickly pallor. “Lookin’ green ‘round the gills, Barr.” 

“Any casualties?” Barry asks instead. 

“No, thank God. Fire is—”

Barry makes a face at his microscope. “Yeah.” 

“Miller thinks that some chemicals might’ve been the accelerant. He said it looked scarily professional." Here, Barry swallows back an hysterical laugh. "They’re already referring to him as ‘The Chemist’.” 

“What—who, Miller?” 

“No, the warehouse arsonist—Damn, Barr. You sure you’re OK? Breathe, son.” Joe slaps him on the back again.

“I’m fine,” he wheezes and tries not to think about how _he apparently has a criminal career now,_ complete with an _actual criminal nickname_. He smile is watery as he zealously studies his foster father’s collar in an effort to avoid his eyes. “Totally fine.” 

*

Two weeks later, Barry shuffles out of his bedroom into his tiny kitchenette. Through a sleepy haze, he’s just picking up the coffee pot and remembering that he’s still out of coffee when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye. 

Blood rushes to his head and he loses time, coming back to himself on the floor, back pressed against the cabinets with glass in his feet and wielding a spoon and a dish rag in each hand like a sword and shield. His teeth are bared in a snarl, clenched together so hard they creak. 

Leonard Snart peers down at him from over the other side of the kitchen counter like a casually curious periscope. “Slow down, kid. Where’s the fire? Oh, wait.” 

Barry blinks up at him, trying to parse out his unhurried drawl and his presence _in Barry’s locked apartment_. 

“Oh,” Barry finally says. “It’s you.” 

Snart’s face doesn’t really resemble Lisa’s, except for the way his expressions flit by too fast for Barry to read. “It’s me,” he finally agrees. “Not a Santini hit man.” 

Barry winces at the cuts in his feet, eyeing the scattered glass on the kitchen floor from where he must have dropped the coffee pot during his pre-mature myocardial infarction. “Who? Why would—oh. The warehouse. You think they saw me? There was a lot of smoke.” Barry certainly didn’t see any of the Santini faces, but that’s probably because he had his eyes shut through the majority of the ordeal. 

His intruder is quiet for a long time, but that’s OK because Barry is too busy being mildly alarmed at the amount of blood coming from his feet, swallowing back manly tears because _oh my God-ow-ow-ow-ow_ , and distantly wondering what he can watch on Netflix today because he’s obviously not going in to work like this. 

“OK, I’ll bite,” Snart says and Barry looks back up in time to see the thief lean back from the counter. He crosses his arms, showing one hand with three of his fingers bandaged in white to protect his regrowing fingernails. There are healing cuts along the side of his left eyebrow, and some dark bruising lingering under his eyes from his broken nose. His eyelids drop in contemplation so it seems as if the he's closed his eyes. Leonard Snart has surprisingly long eyelashes, Barry notes. “If you weren’t afraid of _me_ and you weren’t afraid of retaliation from the Santinis for burning down their property and biting the ear off of one of their thugs—”

Barry gags. “Ew, ew—I can’t believe I—do you know how many diseases…?” 

“At least ten that I can name right now.”

“Right? And all of them—” 

“Positively nightmarish.” 

Barry shudders. 

“…Who the hell did you _think_ I was, kid?” 

“I…” Barry trails off. Thing is, he didn’t _really_ think at all. He just saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and then suddenly he couldn’t function past the _rage_ and the _terror_. As adrenaline recedes, as he stops to think, it’s possible that he thought it was The Man in Yellow. Even now, after all of this time. 

His parents’ house had been locked that night, too. 

(Barry still checks the locks at least five times before he goes to bed each night. And the windows. And he walks every inch of his apartment before he goes to bed and after he gets in from being out. He’s been doing routines like that since he was a kid, since right after his Mom…) 

Barry swallows, runs a hand through his hair, brushing away uncomfortable introspection. He looks around his apartment before scowling up at Snart in sudden realization. “Fucking _shitballs!_ ” Barry accuses. “You can’t just break into people’s homes!”

Snart rolls his eyes and sighs. Barry feels like no one sighs that loudly unless they _want_ everyone to know they are sighing. “Not so quick on the uptake, are ya kid? I _can_ break in, obviously,” he says with a broad wave of his hand. “The word you’re looking for is _shouldn’t_.” The thief comes around the counter, stopping before Barry, boots crunching glass. 

Barry points his spoon at him menacingly. “I will not hesitate to use this.” One of his first cases with the CCPD was a murder that involved utensils. He, unfortunately, knows the amount of pressure and torque needed to jam the spoon into Snart’s stomach. 

Barry was wrong. Snart’s unimpressed look is a dead ringer for Lisa. He reaches down, grabs Barry by the wrist, and hauls Barry's body up and over his shoulder in one movement. “You’re a hazard to yourself and others, kid. I speak as an authority on this matter, having witnessed you in both situations.”

“ _Your face_ is a hazard,” Barry confides to Snart’s ass, since that’s about the only thing currently in his view. Then he realizes that that could be misconstrued as a bizarre compliment so he clarifies, “Meaning that you’re a mean and ugly robber and I hate you.” 

“That accusation is only half-true. I would say that I’m here more in the burglar capacity, and I'm actually here to _give_ you something. Robbery implies taking something ‘by force or fear’.” 

“Well, you broke into my apartment _by force_. I feel threatened,” Barry says by farewell to Snart’s ass as the the older man flips Barry from over his shoulder and onto his small couch. Barry lets out a ‘whoompf’ as he lands, blinking rapidly up at Snart who just tilts his head to squint at Barry’s feet hanging off the arm of the couch. 

“Damn, kid. You don’t do anything by halves. Where’s your bathroom?” But the apartment is tiny so it’s not exactly a mystery. Snart’s already turned on a heel, stalked into the bathroom, and returned with a towel, a bottle of alcohol, and a small first aid kit before Barry can even begin to figure out how to answer him. 

He didn’t know he had a first aid kit. 

“Did you break in to steal my towels?” 

“You have a Yoshi toothbrush,” Snart announces instead of answering as he pulls a chair up to the end of the couch. 

“So?” 

“It’s _kid-sized._ ” 

Barry barely refrains from pointing out that it’s because the store didn’t have an adult-sized Yoshi toothbrush. He’s pretty sure that it would be more damaging to his dignity than helpful. 

“There’s _Star Wars_ tooth paste, bubble gum flavor—”

“OK, but that’s because mint makes me gag. It’s a legitimate condition—” 

“And also rose-and-cashmere-scented volumizing shampoo—”

“Look, are you going to rob me or give me a laundry list of what’s in my bathroom? _You’re the worst criminal ever._ I say this as an actual authority on the subject. I have a diploma and a laminate to prove it.”

“You have a _Spiderman_ bubble bath bottle.” 

“What I choose to put in my bathroom is none of your damn business. You’re a thief! You shouldn’t even _be_ here. Also, I am an independent, grown-ass man, and my choices are my own,” Barry defends hotly from his place on the couch where’s he’s wearing nothing but _Scooby-Doo_ boxers, bleeding from his feet, and still clutching the spoon and dish rag. 

“Oh, I know that, too. Found your dildo.” 

Barry rolls his eyes. “No you didn’t.” 

“Are you implying that you do, in fact, have one? Just not in your bathroom?” 

_Barry’s face is on fire._ “Oh my God, get out of my freaking apartment!” He shrieks as he lunges up, deciding to try homicide by spoon after all. 

Snart deftly bats away Barry’s flailing arms and shoves him back to the couch with one firm push to his bare chest. “What is even happening?” Barry bemoans to the ceiling. 

Apparently, Snart decides to take this literally. “I’m removing glass from your feet while we chat about you acting White Knight against four big, bad mobsters for my baby sister and me two weeks ago.” 

Barry grimaces, because that doesn’t sound sane _at all_. “Technically, Lisa was the White Knight. I was more like the clever, chaotic-good horse in _Tangled_.” Snart just stares blankly and it occurs to Barry that hardened criminals probably haven't seen _Tangled_. 

“Look, kid. As _illuminating_ as our back-and-forth has proven to be, let’s cut to the chase. I owe you one. What do you want?” 

Barry’s jaw dropped. “Is _that_ what all of this is about? Couldn’t you have—I don’t know—called? Sent a post card? Or just _knocked_?” 

“Don’t be so dramatic, kid.” 

Barry squints. “ _You’re_ the dramatic one. Breaking in to someone’s house just to ask them a question.” 

“Was going to make myself coffee, too, but you’re out.” 

“And now you’re, like, what? Pouting because I tried to kill you with a spoon and out-dramatized you.” 

“That makes you sound like a badass, which is grossly inaccurate. The dramatic part was you slicing up your own feet on glass _you_ dropped.”

“I don’t want _anything_ , except maybe a promise that you’ll never break in again.” 

“I don’t _owe_ people, kid. It’s just not something that I do. I’m all about _quid pro quo_ —it’s a good habit to get in to, in my line of work. Tell me what you want in return.” 

“No, really. I just want you to not break in again. And Pop Tarts. Could you get me some Pop Tarts? In the top cabinet next to the fridge. I won’t be able to get them because of, you know,” he waves down at his feet. 

Snart’s face was a study in _pissed off_ , even though he didn’t look up from his work involving tweezers and gauze. Barry didn’t know _why_ he was mad, it was just some goddamned Pop Tarts. Such a drama queen. 

“I’m not in a mood to be _played_ with,” Snart warns, though his grip on Barry’s ankle never changes. “Tell me what you want, kid, so we can both get on with our lives.” 

Barry presses his lips together, annoyed, and also _freaking insane_ for what he’s about to say. “Fine. Two things. No, three.” 

“Ah, greedy. I have to say, that doesn’t seem fair. But I’m all ears, kid.” 

“One: no more home invasions—not just _my_ home,” he quickly adds at Snart’s look. “Three months ago, before the museum heist, there was a home invasion before that. Rich guy, Northside of town.” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Snart says in an airy way that means he knows _exactly_ what Barry’s talking about.

“Sure,” Barry nods. “And, like. Guy’s a total douche, I remember. I don’t even care that _he_ got robbed. But Snart—there was a _family_ there when you broke in. He has a _kid_. Only the rich douchebag got roughed up, not the family, I get that. But—no more home invasions with families.” 

Snart finally looks up at him, blue eyes narrowed and piecing, face completely unreadable. “What’s number two, kid?” 

“Don’t—don’t hurt anyone. Don’t kill them. At any place you rob.”

“Christ, kid—”

“No. You—I’ve personally investigated at least three of your crimes. I can’t get hard enough evidence, but I’m pretty sure they were you. You’re good enough to do this, to get in and out without encountering anyone. So do it.” 

“Sounds like you want to take all of my fun away.” 

“I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.” 

Snart leans forward, eyes flashing, face cold and shoulders tense. Barry tries to disappear into the couch cushions in response to that look. “You don’t know me, kid.” 

Barry thinks that’s somewhat inaccurate. He saw Snart cool and sarcastic when surrounded by fire, and worried about his sister during their escape. He remembers the criminal, beaten and bloody, holding Barry up while he choked on smoke, remembers a hand pressed between his shoulder blades, a half-said encouragement in his ear. Barry recalls crime scenes that revealed a methodical mind and incredible skill. 

But Barry says, “No, I don’t.” Because saying the opposite would piss off the wanted felon and Barry’s not so sure he can get enough leverage from his place on the couch to defend himself with his spoon. (Also, to be honest, he’s not going to _use a spoon to stab Snart_. Because that’d be _gross._ ) 

Something makes Snart relent and fall back away from Barry. “And the third thing?” 

“Pop Tarts.” 

It could be the pain influencing his perception of the world, but Barry thinks that Snart almost smiles at that. “You drive a hard bargain,” he drawls exaggeratedly, crossing his arms and tapping his fingers contemplatively against his bicep (so dramatic, Barry swears). “I’ll have to mull this over, you understand.” 

“Even the Pop Tarts?” 

The criminal lets out a rush of air from his nose that an insane person might point out to him was actually a laugh. “Yeah, kid. I’ll need to take some time to seriously contemplate _all_ of your conditions.”

Barry Allen isn’t ashamed of trying his pouting face against the other man, but Snart rolls his eyes and steps toward the door. 

“Be seeing you around, Barry.” And then Snart is gone, leaving Barry on the couch, still clutching his spoon and dish rag. 

It takes about five minutes, but Barry eventually manages to crawl into his bedroom and fumble his phone from his nightstand. 

“Hey, Iris? Could you come over and get my Pop Tarts down from the top cabinet? And… maybe take me to the hospital to get stitches in my feet?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like being robbed in general can compromise your sense of security, not to mention witnessing part of a violent crime. Add in the fact that the person who broke in and took Barry's parents away _defied explanation_ , and I expect Barry would have developed some PTSD symptoms and/or OCD-like tics. This fic was supposed to be lighter, but so far I can't avoid addressing the sensitive issues Barry and the Snarts might have. I'll try to tag any possible triggers.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry and Lisa team up again to watch Netflix, go on a road trip, and to bring down a death cult. Not necessarily in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's not named, but Damien Darhk from _Arrow_ and his evil totem make a brief appearance.

Some time later, when he least expects it, Barry opens his apartment door early one morning and runs straight into Lisa Snart. 

“What—what are you _doing_?” His startled yell turns into a harsh whisper as he furtively looks around the hallway. “It’s _three_ in the morning!” 

Lisa, fully dressed and with fresh makeup, raises one hand to stave off Barry’s mounting tirade. “ _I_ was going to knock. Because I’m considerate, unlike _some_ people,” she insists fervently before waving her other arm, which is laden with a bag of Big Belly Burger. “Thought we could, I don’t know. Watch Netflix. Or. Whatever Millennials do.” 

Barry has thoughts about all of this, so he asks, “Big Belly is open this late?” And then, “Netflix at three in the morning?” And finally, “What, with me?” It’s now been a month and some change since the warehouse, a few weeks since Snart broke into his apartment. Besides Snart’s one impromptu visit, Barry hasn’t seen any sign of the siblings, nor heard back from Snart about the deal Barry proposed. He blinks and adds belatedly, “ _You’re_ a Millennial.” 

“I think a better question is: what are _you_ doing at three in the morning?” Lisa asks, motioning to Barry’s general person, which is also fully dressed with the addition of a hastily stuffed overnight bag. 

“I’m—well—” He presses his lip together, cheeks flushing. How does he explain to an incredibly cool and attractive _alleged_ criminal that he’s sneaking away to Texas to investigate cattle mutilations and a suspicious death? “I’m going to Texas to investigate cattle mutilations and a suspicious death.” 

Well, apparently he explains it like that. 

“…That’s possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,” Lisa muses after a beat. “Is this like a _Supernatural_ thing?” 

Barry shrugs and launches into crime report mode. “I’ve never found any conclusive evidence that suggests a supernatural element in the ones I’ve investigated thus far. But I’m not ruling out—oh. You mean the show. No, I don’t think it’s a demon or whatever. It’s usually a cult. Or, the one time, really drunk members of a local fraternity. Which is, I’ll be honest, actually more disturbing and terrifying than a cult.” 

“So you’ve investigated cattle mutilations before?” Lisa asks, clearly unable to make up her mind if she wants to be disgusted or mildly alarmed at the wellbeing of Barry’s psyche—and her current proximity to it. 

“A few. Like I said, usually a cult—the scary kind with the indoctrination and the objectifying of women and the incompetence with planning acts of terror. I just want to be clear that I’m not mistaking the local Wiccan community with, like, malignant Satan-worshippers or anything like that. I met a nice coven in Chicago once. Uhm. Really sweet—they even helped me with the case, and one even let me stay in their house so I didn’t have to spend money on a hotel! Excellent tea. Uhm…” he tugs at his hair. “It’s really the suspicious death I’m more interested in this time, so…” And, OK. He’s not ashamed of chasing down the weird and impossible. He’s not. It’s fun, most of the time. And one day it might even help him free his dad. Plus, he gets to meet really interesting people. But he didn’t realize how _crazy_ it all sounded until now. 

“Are you doing this for the CCPD?” 

“Uh, yeah. S-sure,” he nods violently, latching on to the excuse. “L-look, I’m going to miss the train. What are you doing here, Lisa?” 

Lisa holds up the Big Belly Burger bag and raises her eyebrows like her intentions should be completely obvious to Barry. “To share a burger with my _new_ favorite arsonist, a.k.a. _The Chemist_ —”

Barry feels himself pale as he urgently looks around his hallway for eavesdropping neighbors. _“Lisa!”_

“—And to drive you to Texas, apparently.” 

Barry pauses, taken aback. He blinks at her and forgets to whisper when he says, “What?” 

Lisa shrugs. “Trains don’t run this late,” she informs him haughtily, ignoring the way Barry deflates. If he doesn’t catch a train he won’t be able to make it to the crime scene on time. “And I’m bored. Cattle mutilations aren’t really what I had in mind, but I’ll play Sam and Dean with you.” 

She steps back so Barry can finally lock his door and move into the hallway. “It’s not like _that_ —”

“I’m clearly Dean, though,” Lisa interrupts. “I have the jacket and also I’m sexy as hell. Look,” she lifts the bag of food again. “I even have burgers and pie in here!” She’s no longer bothering to whisper and she seems disproportionately cheery at the prospect of LARP-ing Dean Winchester at three in the morning in the hallway of CSI Barry Allen’s dilapidated apartment building.

Barry sighs. “Why are you doing this, really?” 

Lisa looks over her shoulder at him and deadpans, “Saving people. Hunting things.” She cracks a smile, breaking character. “C’mon, Barry—you’ll be Sammy. Because you’re taller. And a geek.”

Barry frowns and reassesses what he knows of the woman before him. She’s a thief. She’s terrified of the police but was willing to ask them for help when it mattered. She’s scarily good at stealing cars. She stormed a warehouse with four armed thugs to save her brother. She’s a really good kisser. Apparently, she’s also a gigantic dork. 

And she’s not telling him something. 

Barry readjusts the duffle on his shoulder and decides he needs the ride. “That’s fine with me,” he finally says. “Sam Winchester is an actual badass.” 

“ _Sam_ is, sure. But you should keep dreaming, Barry,” Lisa scoffs as she leads him down the hallway. “Think we could steal an Impala on the way out?” 

_“Absolutely not.”_

*

They head out at half past three in the morning in a Jetta, eating lukewarm burgers and melty chocolate pie. Sometime after daylight, they stop for gas and food in Oklahoma. 

Lisa leaves the bill to Barry, stepping out of the restaurant first “to start the car”. It only takes Barry five minutes to use the bathroom and pay for their meal. But when he comes out the Jetta is gone and Lisa is casually leaning against an Impala, the morning light glinting off of sunglasses she _definitely_ didn’t have at the start of their trip. 

“It’s a ’70 Impala, not a ’67,” she says, but her grin puts Barry in the mind of cats and canaries. 

“How did you even do this?” Barry shrieks. _“It’s been five freaking minutes!”_

Lisa hums contemplatively. “I know, Lenny would’ve been faster.” She brightens. “I grabbed an AC/DC tape, too. What do you think of the sunglasses?”

*

It’s early afternoon when they leave the crime scenes. They stop by a local grocer to cool off in the air conditioning. 

“I’m starving,” Lisa moans. “But the thought of meat makes me want to hurl.” 

“Sorry,” Barry agrees, wandering up an aisle, looking for ginger ale and saltines. The cattle were… yeah. They were really, really gross and an assault to all senses. But Barry frequently gets up close and personal with dead _humans_ , which is worse to him, and so he’s somewhat desensitized. Lisa, however, didn’t fare as well. 

_“Why?”_ Lisa grumbles and Barry’s not sure if she’s asking why he’s sorry or why she even came with him on this _Supernatural_ road trip.

So, because he’s not really sure how to respond to that, he goes with: “They said that the dead man died of suffocation. They’re thinking he ran out of air in that basement.” He finds the ginger ale and hands it to Lisa. 

Lisa presses the cold bottle to her forehead. “You don’t think so?” 

Barry shakes his head slowly, humming thoughtfully. “I don’t know. His windpipe was crushed, but there was no bruising. And I don’t think it happened in the basement. Found some stuff at the scene that makes me think his body was moved post-mortem… think I want to follow-up on that before I leave. If that’s OK. I can take the train back if you want to go ahead and go.” 

Lisa shrugs. “I’ve got time to kill,” she sighs. “I know you’re not here for the CCPD. Why did you skip work and come almost four hundred miles just to see this random dead guy? Why do you even _care_?” 

Barry finds the saltines and hands those to Lisa, too, before wandering aimlessly up another aisle. He anxiously rubs the back of his neck and avoids eye contact with Lisa. “Just do. Or, I guess not really _care_ , maybe… I don’t know, Lisa. It’s just important. Hey!” He breaks off excitedly, partly in relief at the presentation of a subject change and partly because he’s pretty sure he just spotted a _new flavor of Pop Tarts_. “I think this is a new flavor of Pop Tarts!” He waves the box in Lisa’s face. “How did I miss this?” She blinks at him before frowning and taking another box for herself. 

“You like Pop Tarts?” 

“No,” Lisa grimaces. “But Lenny has been weirdly obsessed with them lately. I’m pretty sure he’s systematically trying every flavor. Figured he might like this.” And then, under her breath in a way Barry isn’t meant to hear but does anyway, “Even though he’s being a _jerk_.” 

“Where to next?” Lisa asks as they exit the store. 

“I want to check out some farms in the area. I’ll need to do a search to figure out which ones, though. There were organic traces consistent with substances generally associated with farm equipment and certain soils and fertilizers. I also got a sample of hay I can analyze, along with… where are we going?” He asks, bewildered, when Lisa suddenly grabs his hand and starts hauling him deeper into the small town. 

“To the library, Sammy. So you can do your geeky research.”

Barry rolls his eyes and fights to smother a smile. 

“After, we can go there,” she nods toward a small little bakery with peeling yellow paint dubbed ‘Hot Crossed Buns’. “The antique store owner said that they had the best apple pie in all of Texas.” 

“I don’t think even _Dean_ eats this much pie,” Barry complains before stopping in the middle of the road. “Wait… _when_ did you talk to the antique store owner?” He asks, casting about the street for sign of the antique shop. “And _why_?” 

Lisa just grins and points to a glimmering golden necklace that she was definitely not wearing a few hours ago. Barry groans. 

“Isn’t it pretty?” 

“I am not acknowledging any object that might or might not have been stolen in the last twenty-four hours,” he swears to himself, averting his eyes. 

Lisa pokes out her lip. 

“…But if I _were_ to acknowledge the existence of such an object, I might admit that it is kind of nice and that the pendant brings out the color of your eyes,” Barry concedes begrudgingly. 

Lisa’s mouth quirks into a half-smile. “You’re unreal, Barry Allen,” she huffs with a shake of her head. Then she starts tugging on his hand again. “C’mon, Sammy. Let’s hit the library. I’ll talk to some of the guy’s friends and family, yeah? And then we’ll have some pie before we go creeping on other peoples’ property.” 

*

It was really good pie. Barry ate two pieces and took two to go, which is why it’s still sitting heavy in Barry’s stomach as they creep up to a barn five hours later. 

“Lying to law enforcement, trespassing on private property…” Lisa is listing off in a whisper. “I’m so _proud_ of you, Sammy.” 

“The traces I found on the body originate from here,” Barry responds as they pause a hundred feet away, ducking behind a battered truck. The sun has almost set and it’s getting extremely difficult to see. 

“That’s what you said about the last two places,” Lisa points out. “…Isn’t it weird that there are so many cars here?” 

Barry finally notices about fifteen cars parked outside the barn. “…Huh. But no lights on in the barn. Think they’re just abandoned?” But even as he asks he reaches up to the hood of the truck they’re behind. The metal is warm, signaling a still-cooling engine. “Weird, let me check inside…” he takes out his phone and turns on the flashlight to do just that. He only has time to peek inside the driver’s window before Lisa is clawing at his hand. 

“Are you _crazy_?” She hisses. 

“What? No—are _you_?” Barry whisper-shouts as he tries to get away from Lisa’s hands. 

“I was wrong, you are a terrible criminal!” She says as she hooks a leg around Barry in an attempt to climb him for his phone. Her move unbalances them both and sends them to the ground. The phone flies out of Barry’s hand and skids underneath the truck. “We are outside the area where a murder potentially took place and you’re giving away our position. Turn off the damn phone, Sammy!” Lisa growls, diving under the truck for the phone. 

“Your _shouting_ is giving away our position!” But Barry also scrambles under the truck to turn off the light. 

They’re both half under the truck now, hissing and accidentally kicking each other as they belly-crawl toward the blinding light of the phone. Barry’s fingers brush the corner of the device when Lisa screams and is yanked suddenly from beside him. 

Barry screams when hands pull him from under the truck, too. He kicks out, but a body presses him down on the ground as another ties his hands together. And then both he and Lisa are dragged toward the dark barn.

*

They’re unceremoniously tied together, back-to-back, on two chairs and left alone in the dark. 

“It’s a cult,” Lisa astutely devises. 

“It’s an _angry_ cult,” Barry says morosely. 

“Clearly they’re a _kinky_ cult.” Lisa shifts, tugging pointedly at where they are tied together. 

“That is deeply disturbing in conjunction with cattle mutilations.” 

Lisa makes an undignified noise. “Don’t talk about that. That was—that was so gross. Here, I have a knife. Hold still.” Lisa fidgets until Barry feels the coolness of a metal blade briefly brush his skin before Lisa sets to work on the ropes. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask… when did you change clothes?” Because it’d been bothering Barry for the past three hours and he didn’t want to be impolite and ask. Now, though, they’re tied together in the barn that is also—apparently—serving as the meeting place for a cult bent on world domination (or, at least, domination of this small Texas town, population: 764), and Barry’s _bored_. “And _how_? You didn’t bring anything with you.” 

It’s been almost 24 hours since they left Central City. Barry’s made do with a truck stop shower and the slightly wrinkled change of clothes he brought. Lisa, on the other hand, is wearing a completely different set of jeans, blouse, and a new pair of shoes. Her hair seems freshly cleaned and curled and her makeup flawless. 

“Let a girl have her secrets, Barry,” Lisa responds, nudging the back of his shoulder with her own. He can’t see her because of the way they’re tied, but he easily imagines her playful smirk. 

The door to the barn swings open and twenty hooded figures pour in, grasping candles and chanting in a suitably creepy fashion.

Well, Barry thinks, as the dim light casts ominous shadows on the walls of the barn. At least they can see now. 

“Barry,” Lisa breathes at the same time Barry whimpers, “Lisa.” 

“Me? This was your idea. Get us out!” Lisa hisses. 

“ _You’re_ Dean! You think of something!” Barry hisses back. 

“You shall be our sacrifices,” one of the cultists intones, clearly the leader as he comes to a stop before Barry. “Your blood will purify us, make us stronger, so that we may prepare the way for the great Beast.” 

“Yeah, it… doesn’t work that way,” Barry says carefully, legitimately worried about the science curriculum in Texan schools. “You’ll just end up staining your clothes—er, robes. And we could be carrying diseases, for all you know. Blood’s just kind of _unclean_ in general, actually. Should _definitely_ be kept on the inside. So, maybe, upon closer consideration of the demerits of blood… maybe you could let us go?” 

“—And we will make way for the Beast, who will cleanse this land and uplift his servants—” The leader continues, pulling a dark object from the folds of his cloak. Barry squints his eyes, but can’t make out much in the dim candlelight. He thinks it might, vaguely, be a sculpture of a head. Or it could be an old, dusty kickball. 

“Right, that didn’t work,” he mutters. “Your turn.” 

“Fine,” Lisa sighs and shoves the knife into his hand. He fumbles, nearly drops it, but manages to hold on and continue cuting at the ropes. 

Lisa, meanwhile, shifts. Barry can’t really see her, what with them being back-to-back, but he imagines her letting her hair fall softly across her face and arranging her posture just _so_. “Boys,” she purrs in a way that has Barry nearly dropping the knife again. 

“And ladies,” Barry croaks out. “There could be ladies here.” 

Lisa ignores him. “I’m sure this is one big misunderstanding. Why don’t we… _talk_ about this?” She shifts again and Barry ends up being hit across the face with her hair as she tosses her head. “You can even leave us _tied up_ , if that’s what gets you going.” 

To her credit, some of the doom cultists do seem to falter. “Jeb,” one of them says with a thick Texan accent. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” 

_“Jeb?”_ Barry mouths to himself, incredulous that a man named _Jeb_ had captured them and was about to ritually sacrifice them to an old _kickball_. 

“Don’t listen to the poisoned words of this temptress,” Jeb says. 

“I think you did great,” Barry loyally assures Lisa. “I think it would’ve worked if he wasn’t crazy.”

“No, Jeb. This has gone too far. Look, they’re barely more than kids—” The outspoken cultist breaks the circle, takes a step toward _Jeb_. 

And then a lot of things happen, almost at once. 

Jeb flings out a hand, full-on _Darth Vader_ style, and the outspoken cultist goes _flying across the fucking barn_. 

The ropes finally snap apart. Barry feels Lisa cry out as she kicks at the nearest cultist while Barry dives low, taking out _Jeb’s_ legs with his shoulder. 

Jeb drops the kickball (actually a carving of a head, Barry confirms, not a kickball) and punches Barry across the face. Barry rolls off but manages to kick Jeb in the ribs before he stands again, knocking him back down. Jeb roars something, tone not at all human, eyes vacant as he reaches out his hand at Barry like he had with the outspoken cultist. 

Barry squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again when nothing happens to see Jeb looking confusedly at his own hand. 

“P-performance problems?” Barry squeaks, mouth dropping open in horror _because he did not just say that to the insane, homicidal cultist_. 

And then he smells something burning and looks over to where Jeb’s candle had rolled into a bale of hay after Barry’s tackle. The hay is catching fire fast, flames spreading to more hay and starting to lick at the barn wall. “Uh oh,” Barry mutters and thinks, _not again_. 

“It needs another sacrifice,” Jeb murmurs, looking toward the kickball-slash-head and back to Barry before his eyes land on the knife Barry had dropped during their scuffle. 

“Uh oh,” Barry says again before crying out when _freaking Jeb_ kicks him in the face and beats Barry to the knife. 

“Die,” Jeb growls. And then he falls over, dropping the knife. 

“Uhm?” Barry asks, bewildered, looking back up from Jeb’s crumpled form to see a strange man standing where Jeb had been. In the growing light of the barn fire, Barry can make out features straight from a "Master Race" propaganda piece. The man has pale skin, hair so blond it is almost white, and deadened blue eyes that eerily reflect the barn’s shadows. The man is wearing a well-tailored suit, the tie of which he reaches up to adjust while he contemplates Barry as one might contemplate an insect. 

“Barry!” Lisa whispers, crawling up to him. Barry blinks and looks around. All of the other cultists are down or gone. Lisa’s hair is messed up, but she doesn’t look bruised or hurt. 

There is, however, blood on the stranger’s knuckles. And on his white collar. 

“Hey, kids,” the man greets, voice startlingly pleasant. He practically _bounces_ on his toes as he beams down at them. “Looks like your date night took a bad turn. Or maybe it didn’t, if you’re in to this sort of thing. Who am I to judge?” 

“Uhm,” Barry says. 

“We have to get out of here,” Lisa tugs on Barry’s shirt. 

“You guys happen to see an ancient totem? Dark, somewhat resembles a human head?” 

Numbly, Barry points behind him. The man’s dead eyes follow the path before a genuinely pleased smile lights up his face. “Thanks, kid. Keep this between us and I won’t kill you, yeah?” And then he breezes past them. 

“ _Come on_ —Jesus Christ, how hard did that guy hit you?” Lisa asks, now standing and pulling at Barry’s arm. 

“Right, burning building,” Barry mutters as he stands abruptly, wincing at the pounding in his face. “Help me with him,” he begs as he bends down and starts pulling on Jeb’s shoulders. 

“You are _as crazy as they are!_ ” Lisa shouts. But she also stoops and helps Barry drag Jeb out of the barn. They run back in for two others while other cultists, stirring from unconsciousness, work on rescuing the rest. 

Lisa and Barry run as soon as it’s clear that everyone is out of the fire. Barry keeps trying to look, but he doesn’t catch sight of the pale man with dead eyes again. 

*

They ditch the Impala with much lip-poking from Lisa. After, they wash off in a gas station and find a hotel one town over. It’s sunrise when they collapse in their beds. Barry’s too tired to be embarrassed at sharing a hotel room with a woman like Lisa, even when she showered and exited the bathroom in a flimsy pair of shorts and tank top (…where and when did she get _those?_ ) 

The blackout curtains sink the room into darkness. They lay on their respective beds, staring quietly into the dark for an indeterminable amount of time. 

Finally, Barry feels compelled to make sure what he saw was real. He doesn’t want it to be another Man in Yellow thing, doesn’t think he could handle that. He’s quiet and timid when he asks, “Did you see what that guy—Jeb—did to the other? How he threw him across the room? Without even touching him?” 

“Like a _demon_ does in _Supernatural_.” Lisa says just as quietly, like she can’t believe the words that are coming out of her own mouth. 

“…Yeah, guess so,” Barry muses. “That explains the death of the other guy. He’d been strangled, but there were no bruises.” 

It’s quiet before Lisa says, voice even smaller than before. “Except it doesn’t explain anything at all. How… how was that _possible_? To hurt someone without touching them?” 

“I don’t know,” Barry answers, despairingly. 

“And that guy that just showed up at the end…” 

“The pale man in the suit?” 

“Yeah, did you see him? What he did?” 

“No? I was busy being kicked in the face.” 

“He took them all out. _All of them in under a minute,_ Barry. It was like… watching a scene from _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_ or something. And he didn’t even look tired, or scared, didn’t care about the fire, or what we were doing there. He saved you, but I don’t think he meant to, don’t think he cared…” 

He just wanted the totem, Barry thinks. Like Jeb did. 

…It wasn’t possible that Jeb’s Darth Vader power came from an ancient kickball, was it? 

They’re quiet for a long time. Barry closes his eyes, but he can’t sleep. His face is hurting. 

“Why did you come here?” Lisa asks, startling him. “What were you looking for?” 

Barry thinks of lying. But he’s too tired and his throbbing head is too distracting. And, besides, in the dark like this with an almost-stranger after a near-death experience, it all seems too unreal. 

“My dad is in prison because they think he killed my mom,” Barry finally admits, shifting uncomfortably with the familiar ache and loss that thrums in his chest. “But he didn’t. I was… there. There was something impossible that happened that night. Something… like with Jeb and however he could throw and strangle people without touching them.” 

Lisa doesn’t say anything so Barry feels like he has to add, “If I can solve one strange case. If I can find reasonable doubt… I can free my dad.” 

He steels himself, but Lisa never reacts. Except to say, “How many seasons have you watched of _Supernatural_?” 

“Just through season five,” Barry answers, wary from the subject change. “Though I skipped a lot of season four and five. I don’t like it when they fight with each other so much.” 

Lisa laughs softly at that and says, “You are unreal, Barry Allen.” It’s the second time she’s said this and Barry still doesn’t understand what she means, but he doesn’t think she’s mocking him. There’s the sound of movement, and then Lisa is lifting the covers and crawling into bed beside him. Barry stiffens as Lisa shifts against him, but then is momentarily blinded as she turns her phone on. “You have a lot of catching up to do. You at least have to watch up to ‘The French Mistake’.” 

She pulls up Netflix and they both prop the phone on Barry’s chest. She lays her face on his shoulder as they watch. 

The first episode fades and Netflix is counting down the thirty seconds to the next episode when Lisa suddenly says, “Lewis, my father, had a parole hearing today—yesterday, I guess.” 

The day she showed up at his apartment, wanting to eat burgers and watch Netflix with a man she met once more than a month ago. 

“Lenny was…” She trails off. “Lenny texted,” she decides to say, though it’s clear that’s not what she intended. “Said that Lewis didn’t get it, but he’ll be up again in a couple of years.” 

That’s all she says, but that’s all she really needs to. It’s what she hadn’t told him when she showed up at three in the morning at his apartment. It’s what she hadn’t trusted him with then, but does so now, a little over 24 hours later. 

Barry swallows thickly but finds he doesn’t have anything to say in response. Instead, he moves his arm so that it’s under her head and around her shoulders. Lisa curls in closer. They fall asleep like that sometime during the second episode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully the _Supernatural_ references aren't too obscure or boring for anyone who hasn't seen the show.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two days later, Leonard Snart (literally) corners Barry for another talk. 
> 
> (And so what if Snart smells amazing. It's not like Barry's noticed. Shut up.)

“Oh no, I am so, _so_ sorry,” Barry says when he opens a seemingly unoccupied mall dressing room stall and sees that it is, in fact, occupied. He’s really intent on _not looking_ at the stranger he accidentally barged in on and on making a hasty exit to avoid even _more_ awkwardness, so he’s very surprised when a hand grabs the material of his shirt and yanks him forward again. Barry loses balance, drops the armful of clothes he had, and trips face-first into a rather masculine chest. He gulps when his attacker reaches around him and ominously locks the stall. 

“Not so fast, kid,” a _very_ familiar voice says in a _very_ familiar drawl. 

_“Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking pogo stick,”_ Barry replies in what, he feels, is the _only_ appropriate response to being ambushed by Leonard Snart in a mall fitting room. “What are you _doing_?” 

“Talking to you, _obviously,_ ” Snart responds smugly, clearly spiritually satisfied that he got such a response from Barry. “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.” 

Barry angles his head from where it’s smooshed against Snart’s chest. He’s unreasonably distracted by how good the man smells (Barry has a thing for cologne, OK, but that doesn’t matter right now since it’s _purely coincidental_ that he’s suddenly taking deeper breathes than necessary). 

“Are you… are you here for _me_?” 

“Well, I’m not here for the overplayed pop music and appallingly inflated prices on hand sanitizer.”

Which has Barry thinking: Do criminals shop like normal people? Try on jeans in the dressing room? Buy avocados at the grocery store? Coupon for vitamins? Buy hand lotion or a facial cleanser? Does being a thief automatically mean that they steal everything? From cotton balls to AA batteries to the _Mona Lisa_? 

“ _How_ did you know I was here?” Barry narrows his eyes as he finally (and somewhat reluctantly) steps back from Snart. He can’t go very far because _it’s a mall fitting room_ , so his back abruptly hits the locked door. “Are you _stalking_ me?” 

“Not _me_ ,” Snart bristles, and Barry can’t tell if he’s genuinely offended or not. “Recon is one thing, but stalking’s not my _schtick_ , so to speak. But I have my ways.” 

“That doesn’t answer anything!” Barry cries, because it finally occurs to him that he should be worried that a criminal is in his dressing room. “And how long were you _waiting_ here? What if I didn’t try on clothes? Or choose this stall?” 

“Fancy threads, kid,” Snart says in blatant avoidance as he contemplates the clothes strewn on the floor. 

“How are you so _melodramatic_?” Barry mutters under his breath and wonders why he was ever even afraid of Leonard Snart. 

“You getting a suit for the Policeman’s Ball?” 

“The police don’t have—” Barry cuts himself off before he says “balls” and nods, almost admiringly, at the thief. “I see what you did there.” 

Snart crosses his arms and leans back against the room’s mirror, the corner of his mouth lifting in amusement. 

“My friend is blackmailing me into going to this thing with her. A _wedding_ ,” Barry finds himself explaining, making a face that signals his feelings on this subject, already expressed at length and in detail—on a yellow legal pad, indexed with multi-colored post-it tabs—to Iris to no avail. “It’s really fancy and I forgot about it and it’s _tomorrow_ and I’m supposed to wear a tux, actually, but it’s too late for that and she’s going to _kill me_. I was just so busy—”

“By busy, do you mean getting my little sister kidnapped and almost killed?” 

The whole freaking world stops and tilts on its axis. Barry sways with it, lightheaded. “Uhm,” he squeaks. 

Snart nods once, approvingly, at how well Barry committed himself to a deer-in-the-headlights impression. “Like I said: you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.” 

“I didn’t mean for—” Snart arches one eyebrow. Barry swallows and tries again. “Technically, she invited herself along—” he breaks off when Snart raises the other eyebrow. Finally, Barry crosses his arms, petulant. “It’s not like I _knew_ a death cult would want to sacrifice us to an old kickball-shaped head.” 

Barry starts, as subtle as he can, to find the handle and lock behind him. “I’m… sorry,” he says after a beat of awkward, intimidating silence. “I told her already, but I _am_ sorry that she almost got hurt. I couldn’t have…” He clears his throat, heart clenching when he thinks of Lisa’s bright grin as she waved an AC/DC tape at him and also of her softened voice devoid of emotion as she tells Barry about her father’s parole hearing. He blinks it away and says with what he feels might be a hopeful, charming smile, “…I got her out, though?” 

Snart rolls his eyes heavenward before pinning Barry with the sassiest look to ever sass. “ _She_ rescued _you_ , Barry. You’d be a line in a newspaper today if she hadn’t come with you.”

Barry opens his mouth to protest but ends up shrugging. “Okay, that’s… fair.” 

“Damn, kid. I was all for the threatening before you showed up looking like a lost baby raccoon. I can’t take you seriously like this,” he makes a gesture that is, somehow, both prim and grand and the exact same gesture a diva might use to say, _’I asked for the sparkling water with strawberry infusion, but this peon gave me spring water instead—how do you expect me to work under these conditions?!’_

Barry winces and leans to the side so his face is reflected back at him from over Snart’s shoulder. He got punched and then kicked in the face by a Texan zealot named Jeb just two days ago and it looks as awful as it did this morning. Worse, even. The bruising is very prominent under his eyes, dark and painful-looking rings dipping down to the tops of his cheeks. The left side of his face is the worse by far—Jeb’s kick had cracked that cheekbone. He does sort of look like a perpetually tired raccoon.

Still hurts like hell, too. 

“So… are we skipping the threats, then? Maybe tabling them for after I don’t look like this? I vote yes. In fact, I vote that we never recommence with the threatening. If, uh, my vote counts for anything—that is.” 

“Look,” the thief drawls. “Far be it from me to prevent my sister from going on more harrowing adventures with the likes of intrepid CSI Barry Allen…”

“Mostly because telling her what to do doesn’t work?” _Exhibit A,_ Barry thinks. _Stolen Impala._

Snart’s expression turns pained. “Mostly because she does the exact opposite of what I tell her. _With prejudice._ ” His eyes flick up. “Besides, she _knowingly_ dragged you into a mob dispute, so I don’t have a lot to work with here. Seriously, though. Have you considered looking into another hobby? Some people paint.” 

“It’s not usually so, uhm, murder-y. It’s mostly dead ends and sometimes there’s tea with Wiccans and, the one time,” Barry tries and fails to repress a shudder. “A furry convention.” 

Barry’s totally not judging. He went to Comic Con with the anime club in high school. _Dressed as Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z._ The turban had been really itchy and when he’d kissed Nick Hamilton (also from anime club, who had dressed a little more subtly as Hiei from _Yu Yu Hakusho_ ), he’d gotten green paint on his face. Barry’s only a little embarrassed by the whole thing now as an adult, but mostly he still thinks it was _really freaking awesome._

“It’s just… the eyes,” he confides to Snart, making a gesture towards his face and shuddering again. 

“Ran into one of those in Berlin a couple of years ago,” Snart nods knowingly. “Nice people. _Astonishingly_ good at poker. Helped me out with a little _tiff_ I was having with the local law authorities at the time… Look,” the thief sniffs imperiously in response to Barry’s narrowed eyes. “The Nazis stole and hid important pieces of culture. I was doing the world a _humanitarian service_.” 

“Right,” Barry nods. “Just to be clear, you are not planning to threaten me? Or skip straight to the maiming and killing?” 

“Your face kind of killed the mood.” Absurdly, Barry finds himself trying not to take offense to that. “I’ll take a rain check.” 

“So…does our deal still stand?” 

“I never agreed to it,” Snart reminds him quickly, scowling at the fact that Barry had the audacity to _assume_. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a habit of trying to put words into other people’s mouths, Barry?” The thief smirks, pushes off the wall, and is suddenly less than an inch away from Barry’s face, sharing the same air, _because the two of them are locked in together in this tiny freaking room_. Barry presses his back further against the stall door but Snart reaches out, bracketing Barry with one arm, leaning in impossibly closer until the heat of him starts soaking through Barry’s clothes and his breath flutters against Barry’s neck. Goosebumps spring up, racing across his body until his skin feels tight and sensitive. 

Snart is so close— _way too close!_ —that his eyes are a field of blue in Barry’s vision, and his heady cologne fills his senses. Barry swallows dryly and tries not to do something embarrassing like pant wildly or _drool_. It’s bad enough that he feels his face start to warm with a blush. 

“Uh,” Barry says unintelligibly. “S-so… you’re _not_ agreeing to it?” He tries to sound confident, but he just ends up sounding sort of breathless and flustered.

(And _who can blame him?_ What is up with Snarts and their lack of respect for Barry’s personal space?)

Snart smirks, and he’s so close that Barry _really_ can’t be blamed for suddenly being distracted by the proximity of that mouth and those lips. The other man slides his hand down, still not touching Barry, and Barry’s heart kicks up and he thinks this might be a flight or fight response except he has nowhere to run and Barry would just really like to know _what_ is happening, _when_ did he step into an alternative universe where threats in a mall dressing room turned into _this_ , _where is Snart’s hand going—_

The lock to the stall door opens with a metallic ‘snick’ that seems to echo like a gunshot. Snart leans in further until Barry’s almost certain he feels lips brush against his ear, “I didn’t break into your home this time, did I?” 

And then, seemingly from one blink to the next, Snart is around him and gone. 

*

Barry nails his _Walking Dead_ impression on the way back to his apartment. He stumbles a slow pace along the sidewalks, mouth still gaping like a fish, and almost walks into traffic not once, but twice. 

_Seriously, what the hell was_ that _?!_ He repeats to himself, over and over like his new personal mantra. 

It’s not until Barry’s halfway home does he realize that he never tried on, much less bought, something to wear to the wedding. He stops abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk when he does, pulls at his hair, and lets out a frustrated, “Arrgghh!” at the world in general. But it’s too late now and he has work tomorrow right before the wedding and maybe Iris won’t hate him too much and maybe even let him off from going altogether? 

But when he gets to his apartment there’s a large package in front of his door. Conscientious of anthrax and incendiary bombs, Barry warily toes it open. 

There’s a _really_ nice tux inside. On top of which is a small sheet of lined paper, neatly torn from a notebook, that reads, 

_“Deal or no deal: You can’t go to a ball dressed like that.”_

Barry should really be worried at how Leonard knew he was at the mall, and how he somehow got a tux and beat Barry home to put it in front of his door. And maybe he is kind of worried about those things, just a little. 

Still, he catches himself smiling off and on and well into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp. This veered unexpectedly into ColdFlash territory. (Seriously. I mean, it was always an eventual possibility, but I meant for Barry to kind of run away from the mall still half-terrified of Len. Instead it got all suggestive. It's probably because Barry thinks Len is freaking adorable in all of his drama queen glory and not a little because he has a thing for Len's cologne.)
> 
> Have I admitted yet that I don't know where this is going? Because I don't. Know where this is going. :D
> 
> Also: Yep. There was a _Psych_ reference. I couldn't help it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry acquires a fan. Len takes Barry on a date. (Pro tip: Puppies win. Every time.) 
> 
> Spoiler: Barry doesn't actually realize that it's a date. (Who _would_ , Len? Who would.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER: Very slight, very NON-GRAPHIC mentions of animal cruelty, NOT perpetuated by any of our beloved characters. Some videos/articles regarding experimentation on Beagles for scientific purposes were floating around the Internet a couple of weeks before I wrote this, and I guess I ended up making sense of it in this chapter. (The animals will get some justice! Dogs need a hero, too.) I do not go into remotely any detail. I won't even link information about it here (but a quick search will bring up plenty of articles, if you're curious).
> 
> [You Can Call Me Betty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480943) is an awesome tag to this chapter by Tobyaudax. Read it!

Unfortunately, ending up with what was probably an ill-gotten tux means he has to go to the wedding with Iris after all. It’s actually the wedding of a girl named Natasha Snyder (“call me Ta-Ta, all my friends do”—Barry can’t make this up), who went to high school with them and was decent friends with Iris. Iris is more interested in Ta-Ta’s father, the CEO of an international sports brand empire. Specifically, she’s interested in interviewing Papa Ta-Ta for her recent school assignment. 

Barry suffered through the wedding and is now suffering through the reception, where Iris plans to bombard Papa Ta-Ta with her surprise interview. “A nice old man stopped and gave me twenty dollars and directions to the nearest youth shelter today,” Barry says, apropos of nothing while Iris reviews her questions and reapplies her lip gloss. “Because he thought I was a homeless teenager.” 

“Was it because you were wearing that one sweater? I told you that you shouldn’t wear that sweater,” Iris says as she criticizes her handiwork in her compact mirror. 

_“It wasn’t the sweater,”_ Barry hisses. “It was _this_ ,” he gestures to his discolored and deeply bruised (and deeply sore) face. “It was the fact that it looks like someone _kicked me in the face_.” 

Iris snaps her compact closed and reaches over to run a hand through his hair. “Poor Barr,” she says with her lip poked out in a _“poor, poor baby”_ face. “I told you: I wanted to kick the ass of that death cult guy for you, but he’s already in jail and I can’t get to him any more.” 

Barry’s not sure if it’s scary or reassuring to know that Iris is being one hundred percent dead serious. He’d seen the train ticket to Texas fall out of her coat pocket yesterday afternoon. 

“My hero,” he tells her, not the least bit disingenuous. “My _point_ is that I’m not exactly doing you any favors like this.” 

“You’re doing the _world_ a favor, trust me. That tux fits you like a glove. And it looks _expensive_. Where the hell did you get it last minute?” 

Barry’s pretty sure that blush clashes horribly with purple bruising. “Oh, a, uhm, f-friend?” He mutters not-so convincingly into his champagne glass. 

“Besides, you don’t really have to do anything. Here’s the plan: I go up to Snyder, ask him some casual questions—”

“How are you going to ask _casual questions_ about his purported violations of human rights in his Togolese factories?” 

Iris purses her lips and _glares_. Barry throws up his hands. 

“No, I mean, I’m all for this. I’m just saying, how does one casually bring up human rights violations to someone they just met ten minutes ago?” 

“With _poise_ and _skill_.” 

Barry smothers a look of horror when he realizes that there’s no punchline and that she’s _serious_. “Iris,” he says, carefully. “I know I can’t point fingers, but you’re kind of a—”

Her glare _intensifies_. Barry cuts himself off and pouts. Iris West may be beauty and grace, but she is far from being delicate or tactful. She’s a wrecking ball. Terrible at listening to advice and excellent at making every conversation seem like a confrontation. Iris and Lisa, in this respect, are complete opposites. Lisa is subtle and manipulative from her curled eyelashes to her boots, meticulously investing each expression, each word, for a higher rate of return from every interaction. Iris, meanwhile, makes a habit of _bursting_ onto every scene and verbally (and sometimes physically) punching you until you give her whatever it is she’s looking for. 

“This is only for a school assignment,” Barry reminds her. “You can interview literally _anyone else_ in this city. A teacher. A small business owner. _Captain Singh_ … I’m pretty sure they don’t give Pulitzer prizes for school assignments. You don’t even _like_ this class.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” 

Barry is entirely unsure as to _what_ principle she’s referring, but he shrugs and goes along with it. 

“Go be a big damn hero, then. I’ll hold your purse.” 

Her smile lights up her entire face. Newly determined, she opens her purse and digs around in her clutch for a breath mint. She pops one in her mouth and hands him one before it disappears back in the purse—next to her phone, lip gloss, makeup compact, a small notepad, a pen, brass knuckles ( _“those are outlawed in the state of Missouri, Iris”_ ), and _pepper spray_. 

“Where did you get this Time Lord technology?” Barry asks, awed, because her purse doesn’t even look like it can hold a business card, much less a cadre of weapons and makeup. 

“I don’t know what that means.” 

“Undetectable extension charm,” Barry translates with _Harry Potter_ speak. “Like Hermoine’s bag in the seventh movie.” 

Iris chuckles distractedly before upending her entire glass of champagne. “Will you…?” 

“Just give the signal and I’ll be there.” 

This time it’s Iris who smiles and says, “My hero.” She stands, takes a breath, downs _Barry’s_ glass of champagne and mutters, “I’m so getting an A in this class.” And then she stalks off with her shoulders squared and chin jutted out. 

_A wrecking ball,_ Barry thinks, fondly. 

“She’s kinda hot,” a rough voice says from _way too close_. Barry jumps and whirls to find a man standing in the space Iris had just occupied. 

“Uh,” Barry starts, but breaks off, unsure. It’s apparent, even in a suit, that the man has a chest and shoulders thick with muscle. His face is handsome, his ears a little ridiculous. His suit doesn’t seem like the quality of the other guests, is slightly ill-fitting, jacket mis-buttoned, collar crooked, and his bow tie is untied. The attire is almost slovenly when compared to the neat lines and high price tags in the room, except Barry suspects that the presentation is more out of lack of care than anything else. 

To complete the picture, one cheek is stuffed almost comically with cake. The other hand is holding a beer, except… Barry had just seen champagne and water being served. Where the heck did he get a beer? 

“H-hey?” Barry tries again. “What do—” he breaks off when the realization hits him suddenly. _“Mick Rory?”_

As with Lisa and Leonard, he’d only ever seen case photos and the crime scenes. A profiler once noted that Rory potentially enjoys the physical thrill of a crime more than Leonard, who the profiler speculated enjoyed the mental challenge of one. This physicality is what made Rory at least _appear_ more sloppy than his sometimes-partner, and certainly more predictable but possibly more threatening, though it did not make him less of a proficient thief and criminal. 

Rory takes another huge bite of cake and waves his beer at Barry in vague acknowledgment and greeting. “Hey, Kit.” 

“Wh-what are you _doing_ here?” 

“Following you.”

_“Why?”_

Rory shrugs. “‘Cause I’ve been following you for three days now, Kit.”

Barry sputters at that, and then realizes that the criminal is not, in fact, mispronouncing “kid”. _“Kit?!”_

“You look like a baby raccoon,” Rory gestures to Barry’s face. “I’m still working it out. ‘Baby Face’ is already taken.” 

Completely ignoring Barry’s offended look, Rory’s eyebrows raise in an “yay!” face when a waiter passes by with more cake, which Rory lifts from the tray easily enough. “This is good cake—very moist. Delicate icing. Just a touch of lemon. You tried any yet?” 

“I… no?” 

“You should.” 

“Oh…kay?” He looks around for cake and retrieves a plate of his own before shaking his head vehemently. “Wait a minute! _Why_ are you following me?”

“Snart said that there would be fire.” 

Barry blinks. 

“Yeah,” Rory shrugs. “He said fire follows you wherever you go. I like fire. But I’ve been following you for three goddamned days, Kit, and I ain’t seen no fires. Thought you’d start one here at least—it’d show these pretentious asses a thing or two, wouldn’t it? But I’m beginning to think that you’re not planning one _at all_.” 

At this, Mick Rory actually _pouts_ at him. 

“Of course I’m not planning on starting a fire!” Barry whisper-shouts. Through his teeth. 

“Figured,” Rory nods somberly. “Guess you need help—but I’m not making a habit of this mentoring crap. Next time I expect to be entertained.” 

“Wha— _no!_ I don’t need an _arsonist mentor_!” And then, “Back up! You’ve been stalking me for three days?” And then, finger-pointing for emphasis, “ _You’re_ the one who told Leonard I was at the mall!” 

Rory shrugs impatiently. “He asked and I knew so I told. Oh, that reminds me,” he hands his beer to Barry to hold and reaches into his jacket. “Here’s your mail. Your _UFO Magazine_ subscription is almost up—better renew that. Also, you’re going to be paying off that student loan for the rest of your life unless you rob a bank.”

Barry wilts a little, despite himself, at having _that_ suspicion confirmed. He’s knocked out of his reverie when a passing couple accidentally brushes against him. 

“Excuse us,” the male says politely. 

“Who is _that_?” The woman whispers not-so discreetly. “I don’t think I remember Ta-Ta mentioning someone like _him_ … did you see his suit?”

“No,” the male answers. “But where did he get that beer?” 

Both Barry and Rory make faces at their backs. 

“I’m not going to start a fire,” Barry mutters, tugging at his hair before absently setting down his cake and reaching up to fix the buttons on Rory’s jacket. “You look _way_ out of place,” he says by way of explanation. “More than my _face_ , so that’s saying something. You’re going to draw attention—there’s security here, you know. Do you even have an invitation?” 

Rory snorts derisively. 

“Right,” Barry sighs before moving to straighten and fix Rory’s collar and bow tie. 

Which is, of course, when Iris returns. 

“Barr—who’s this? I’m Iris,” she says to Rory when Barry takes too long to respond. 

“Mick,” he says with a nod and sort of _pouts_ again when he discovers that Barry’s arms are in the way of cake and beer. He makes a couple of aborted movements before glaring mutinously at Barry. “Leave it, it’s fine.” 

“No, you look like you dressed yourself with your eyes closed,” Barry reprimands. 

“Barr!” Iris slaps his shoulder reproachfully. “That’s not nice. How do you know Mick?”

“I—uh,” Barry freezes, having suddenly forgotten his command of the English language. 

“I’m his plus one,” Mick says. 

“Not helping!” Barry hisses. 

“Oh! I—Barr, if you’d wanted to bring someone else instead all you had to do was—”

“I see how it is,” Rory drawls.

“What? No! Iris, come on. It’s not like that—it’s not what it looks like—”

“I thought tonight would be different,” Rory interjects, utterly monotone. “I thought you would be different. I won’t be a dirty little secret you keep in your closet, Allen.” 

The last bit is even a little muffled around another bite of cake.

“Oh my God!” Barry exclaims, slapping his palm to his face. And then: “Shit! Shit! Ow, oh my God.” Because he still has a cracked cheekbone. “Ugh,” Barry moans. “How did the interview go, Iris?” 

“About that,” she clears her throat. “We should probably leave before security finds us.” 

“What?” Barry squeaks. “Did you need help? There was no signal!” 

“Turns out,” Iris starts, cooly. “That he is _Matthew_ Snyder, CEO of a national health foods company instead of _Michael_ Snyder, CEO of an international sports brand. It’s _understandably easy_ to get them confused. And I don’t think _Matthew_ appreciated being accused of human rights violations in Togo when he doesn’t even have facilities in that country, unlike _Michael_.” 

“ _No one_ would appreciate being accused of that,” he assures. _Wrecking ball,_ Barry thinks again, resignedly. 

“Anyway,” Iris whispers urgently when they see two security men heading their way. “Time to go.” 

“Don’t forget cake,” Rory reminds them. 

Barry makes a noise and grabs a few plates before following Iris and Rory out. 

Ten minutes later they settle on a stoop a block away. Barry in a tux, Iris in a golden gown, and a criminal sitting cross-legged beside them. Together, they eat cake and drink beer. 

“How did you have three bottles of beer in your jacket?” Barry muses. 

“I’m going to fail this class,” Iris sighs. 

“Can’t believe there wasn’t fire. _Again._ ” 

“Cake is good, though,” Barry admits. “I like the touch of lemon.” 

“How do you think they got it this moist?” Rory asks. 

“Do you think it’s extra oil? I read somewhere pudding mix can make a cake more moist.” 

“I’ll have to try that,” the felon muses. 

“…I’m sorry,” Iris interjects. “How did you two meet?” 

“Through work,” Barry says. 

“I stalked him for three days,” Rory says at the same time. Barry groans. 

“…Oh?” Iris asks, eyes darting between them, trying to figure out if it was a joke or if she should get out her pepper spray. “Interesting… occupational choice?” 

“Nah. I’m a thief and arsonist by trade.” 

Barry chokes on his beer. 

Iris blinks. And then smiles. 

“Mick, do you mind if I interview you? It’s for a class assignment.” 

*

Barry hears footsteps approach but doesn’t look up from his intent work. It’s not Captain Singh because his entrance would’ve been preceded by the sound of impatience and disappointment. Joe would have announced himself with a world-weary “Barr”. 

A file lands with a soft sound next to his arm. Barry cringes at the implied additional workload and gives up the notion that he’ll get off at a decent time this evening (there goes the _Supernatural_ marathon/ _Supernatural_ drinking game he had planned with Lisa). 

“Thanks,” he says, trying to sound genuine. It’s not the messenger’s fault he has to stay later. 

“The photos were about seven years out of date, so I took the liberty of updating them,” Leonard’s voice sounds from _right over Barry’s shoulder_. 

Barry chokes and flails, sending his notes, pens, and water bottle crashing to the ground. The microscope teeters dangerously, but it’s caught by Leonard’s deft hands and slid safely back onto the table. Barry swivels around in his chair, eyes wide, pressing his back against the desk and gaping up at the thief who is in _his lab_ at the _police precinct_. 

“You’re _unbelievable_! What are you _doing_ here?” Barry means for this to sound every bit as alarmed as he feels, but he sort of gets distracted by the fact that he’s close enough to count Leonard’s eyelashes and smell his cologne (still so good). 

“What are you working on?” Leonard asks casually, gaze taking in the instruments behind Barry. 

Reminding himself to breath normally and to otherwise act like _everything is perfectly fine, criminals surprise me in the crime lab and crowd into my space all of the time, no big deal_ , he answers, “I, uh—DNA analysis, uhm, trying to figure out the make and model of a car from the paint chips and… preparing for a chemical restoration? So I can maybe lift the scratched out serial number from the firearm?” He nods to where the firearm is laid out on the table. 

“That’s… interesting,” Leonard says with a mystified expression like he hadn’t expected a legitimate occupation like police work to actually be intriguing. 

“Allen!” Singh shouts from the hallway and Barry doesn’t think. He grabs Leonard by his shirt and hauls him toward the huge metal cabinet. He’s totally surprised when the thief doesn’t resist as Barry shoves him in the cabinet, but _he’s_ the one who is about to be caught by _the freaking police captain_ because _he broke into the fucking police station, the arrogant asshole_. 

Barry slams the metal door shut and leans with his back against it, eyes wide, just as Captain Singh bursts into the room. 

“You roared, sir?” Barry asks with a strained smile, voice cracking only a little. 

“Allen,” Singh gives him a squinty look. “What the fuck are you up to now?”

“Uh,” Barry says, intelligibly. “Running a DNA analysis on the Crescent Street robbery? And, uhm, running tests on paint chips to see if I can identify that car in the hit-and-run case and, uhm, trying to pull the serial number off of that firearm found at the Quick Stop shooting?” 

“That all?” Singh asks. “You look like you’re up to something.” 

“That’s, uh. J-just my face. Sir.” 

Singh’s dark eyes linger a little longer before he seems to shrug it off for now. “Whatever, Allen. I came for information on the hit-and-run. You got something for me?” 

“In about ten more minutes, sir.” 

“Fine. Wait—why the hell are you looking into that Quick Stop shooting? Miller said we couldn’t get any useful information from ballistics.” 

Barry shrugs helplessly and makes awkward hand gestures to somehow indicate, _“I told him that the chemical restoration would probably work but the douchebag didn’t believe me.”_

But Captain Singh, who is probably the scariest person Barry has ever met (by comparison, Barry isn’t even worried about the known criminal he just stuffed into a metal cabinet), is also one of the most intuitive. He takes in Barry’s expression and silent flailing and nods knowingly. 

“Good work, Allen.” 

Barry beams. Singh turns to leave. “But if I don’t hear from you in ten minutes about that hit-and-run then I’m coming back up here and you don’t want that to happen.” 

“N-no? Sir.” Barry squeaks at Singh’s retreating back before heaving a sigh and slouching back wearily against the cabinet. 

A few seconds pass. And then a “shave-and-a-haircut” knock comes from inside the cabinet. 

“Oh! Right.” Barry whispers, turns, and throws open the cabinet. The the bottom of the cabinet is nowhere long enough for a man to lay down or even sit in, so Leonard’s long legs are propped high against one side of the cabinet and his shoulders are jammed up the other side. He glares up at Barry, and he looks so much like a grumpy house cat that got himself stuck in a tiny space that it startles a loud, helpless laugh from Barry. He has to lean up against the side of the cabinet for support. 

“I was going to make a comment about liking it when you manhandle me,” Leonard mutters, crossing his arms _like a pouting child_. “But your face ruined it.” 

Barry’s cheeks are starting to ache and he has to wipe tears from his eyes before he can regain some sense of composure. “I’m sorry,” Barry says, breaking out into another big grin. He clears his throat to get another round of laughter under control before he reaches down. “Come on.” 

Leonard seems momentarily taken aback, blue eyes shifting warily from Barry’s hand to his face. Finally, with a speculative frown, the other reaches up, a wide palm fitting against Barry’s, long and thin fingers gripping his wrist for support as Barry tries to haul him out. 

There’s no graceful way to get out of a metal cabinet, but Leonard seems to somewhat achieve it. In fact, it’s Barry who stumbles backwards and loses his balance, only for Leonard to briefly grasp his sides to steady him. Barry can’t control the ridiculous smile he gives Leonard because it suddenly occurs to him that, bizarrely, he’s _glad_ to see the other man. He doesn’t know _why_ —the infuriating, overdramatic man almost got himself arrested just now. _Barry_ could’ve been arrested. Or _fired_. 

And yet. 

Leonard’s still wearing that speculative frown, one brow crinkled, but after a few beats of silence the look melts into a familiar smirk. 

“W-why are you,” Barry clears his throat, licking dry lips and fervently ignoring the way Leonard’s smirk somehow _deepens_. “What are you doing here?”

“Been thinkin’ ‘bout our deal, Barry Allen,” he drawls. 

“So you came to talk about it _at the police station_?” A beat. “Tell me honestly… do you not own a phone?” 

“Are you asking for my number?” 

“What—I’m _asking_ if you’re agreeing to our deal.”

“Maybe. On one condition: Meet me tomorrow night at ten.” 

“W-What?” Barry squeaks. “S-Sure? Uhm, where?” Then, realizing what was just said, flails his hands. “Wait. What? _Why?_ ” 

“Which one do you want answered?” 

“The ‘why should I meet a known felon in a deserted place in the wee hours of the night’ one.” 

“First: I didn’t say anything about a deserted place. We’re meeting a Big Belly Burger. I like their milkshakes. You shouldn’t let that imagination of yours run so far away with you, Barry. Second: it’s ten at night, hardly the _wee hours_.” 

“It is for hard-working individuals with legitimate jobs.” 

“You’re not working the day after. You’re not even on call.” 

“How did you—” Barry breaks off, crossing his arms and scowling. _“Rory.”_ He glares suspiciously around the lab, as if expecting the pyromaniac to jump out from underneath a desk lamp. 

“So are we in agreement?” Leonard asks. 

“So we’re just… eating burgers and talking about how you’re not going to break into homes or hurt people any more? Kind of a weird place for that conversation.” 

“Of course not. I’m taking you somewhere after we eat.” 

“…OK,” Barry sighs when Leonard doesn’t offer further explanation. “Where?” 

“It’s a surprise,” he says with a casual shrug and a not-so-well-hidden smile as he starts backing towards the door to the lab. “Just wear generic, dark clothing,” he says as he turns on his heel and waves at Barry as he walks away. “See you tomorrow—oh,” he looks over his shoulder. “You have three minutes and forty seconds before the good captain is supposed to return.” 

“Shit!” Barry hisses, diving towards his work table. When he looks up a few seconds later, Leonard is gone. 

*

“Gotta say,” Barry sighs around a mouthful of chocolate pie. “This isn’t how I imagined the night going.” 

Leonard and Barry are sitting on the hood of the car Leonard drove, a few miles outside of Central City, eating burgers and pie. The sky is incredibly clear and, outside the worst of the city’s glare, the stars are numerous and dizzying above them. 

“Gotta ask,” Leonard parrots. “How did you imagine it?” He’s sitting extremely close, their hips brushing each time one of them moves. It’s… a little disconcerting. 

Probably not in the way it should be. 

“Not sure,” Barry shrugs. “Think it involved no one finding my body.” 

Barry’s looking up at the stars while he chews and talks, but he can sense it when the other turns his face toward him incredulously. 

“You thought this might be the last night of your life, and you still came anyway?” 

Barry’s cheeks warm, but he tilts to meet the thief’s eyes. “Well, yes.” He licks his lips, chasing the sweetness. 

Surprisingly, Leonard actually chuckles at this without even the slightest hint of sarcasm or mockery. “I forgot,” he muses. “You’re the man who takes on mob kill squads and faces down death cults on the regular.” 

Barry runs a hand through his hair, chuckling nervously. “I wouldn’t say _on the regular_. But, yeah… so stupid, right?” 

“Without question,” Leonard assures. 

“So did you really bring me out here to talk about the deal?” 

“Bored already? I know it’s not a death cult or a fancy party, but I thought we had a thing going here.” 

Barry frowns, sudden realization striking unexpectedly and before he knows it, he’s opening _his stupid, big mouth_. “Were you… jealous?” 

“Of course not, Barry,” Leonard says, a little too quickly and somewhat snidely. 

Barry suppresses a smile and finishes the last of his pie. “Well, I’m not bored. Just curious.” 

“Good,” Leonard says. He nods toward a direction ahead of them. “See those lights? Through the trees?” 

Barry squints, leaning against Leonard to better follow his line of sight. “Yeah, sure. What about it? Hey—isn’t that GenTech?” He takes a moment to orient himself before nodding. “Yeah, that’s the huge research facility outside of Central. They specialize in pharmaceutical development and testing, but they have a load of other chemical and bioengineering projects. They’re sort-of peripheral competitors to STAR and Mercury Labs, except STAR and Mercury are a lot more into theoretical, reach-for-the-stars research.” 

“Good, you do know about it.” Leonard tosses his empty milkshake cup into the paper bag. Then he reaches into his jacket and takes out a thick folder. “Because we’re going to steal something from them.” 

“We?” Barry shrieks. And then, “Fuck, no.” And then, “How is this not against the deal?” 

Leonard lifts one finger. “It’s not a home invasion, it’s a corporate one.” He lifts a second finger. “We’re not going to hurt anyone.” And a third. “I’ll give you Pop Tarts.” 

“Really? What kind— _no!_ You cannot bribe me with Pop Tarts, _you fiend_.” Barry hisses, earning an eye roll from the other man. “I will not be an accomplice in your _thieving shenanigans_ , do you hear me?” 

“No deal, then.” 

“What?” 

“You want me to be good—I think that’s _just precious_ , by the way,” he confides. “I sort of get it though, if only because _I_ want _you_ to be bad. Just a little. So that’s what I want you to do tonight—it’s only fair, Barry.” 

Barry narrows his eyes. “What are you saying?” 

“I’m saying do this and I’ll agree to the deal. No take backsies.” 

“But _why_?” 

Leonard shrugs. “Why did you propose the deal to begin with? What are you hoping to see? To accomplish?” 

“I—” Barry tugs at his hair. “I just—I just know what it’s like to be the _victim_. To have your whole world and sense of security violated at the whim of another. And I don’t want that for _anyone_ else— _no one_ deserves that. And so I thought, if I could stop that from happening, if I could stop you from _causing_ it…” he licks his lips. “And, maybe. Maybe I think there’s some good—in you and Lisa. And it’s—it’s not my place, but. But I wanted to… I didn’t know you, but I had some power, some _say_ about something and I wanted to use that to make that goodness a bigger part of you, I guess.”

“Well, well,” Leonard drawls, softly, and not necessarily unkindly. “The truth is out. Assistant CSI Barry Allen, intrepid do-gooder, squeaky-clean hero of the CCPD, had power over someone and sought to use it to control them.” 

The words make Barry want to shrivel up in shame. At the exact same time, he’s not sure he’s even sorry for his actions. Why should he be, if it ends up helping Leonard and Lisa _and_ other people? It’s that part of him that forces him to look up and meet Leonard’s gaze head-on. 

The other man is smirking, studying Barry for every reaction, for every thought and feeling. “And that’s why I want you to do this, before I agree to your little deal. Because you may see some sort of good in me, if that’s what you want to call it, but I see the bad in you. The part that lies to your boss so you can chase fantasy stories, the part that breaks onto private property, that doesn’t report their friend for stealing a car or three, that doesn’t confess to two separate property fires.” He leans in closer, expression indescribable, and Barry’s not sure if they’re about to punch or kiss. “The part in you that sees some power over someone else and _uses_ it for his own ends.” 

Barry clenches his jaw until it’s painful. He doesn’t know what he wants to say, doesn’t know if he wants to lash and defend himself or if he wants to cry or laugh bitterly. “And tonight?” He whispers, finally. “Is that what this is about? ‘Unleashing my inner criminal’?” 

Leonard shrugs again. “Who knows? Maybe tonight is about us meeting as equals. Or maybe about seeing who has the most power over the other in the end.”

“And you’ll agree to the deal after?” 

“I won’t stop my thieving and scheming ways,” Leonard says, tilting his head. “But I’ll agree, no matter what happens tonight.” 

“I won’t help you hurt anyone. Ever.” 

Leonard pushes the folder into Barry’s hands. “Don’t worry, I think I won’t have to work too hard to be persuasive. Did you know GenTech experiments on Beagles?” 

Barry blinks, totally derailed by the subject change. “I—no? I mean, some labs do,” he frowns in distaste. “It’s awful, but a lot of the time it’s because they’ve run out of options and they have to make something safe for humans. I think it’s wrong, that there _has_ to be another way, but… I’m also a scientist, so I also get that sometimes there isn’t.” He swallows. “The few labs that do it use it as an absolute last resort and are as humane about it as possible…” His words feel weak even as he says them, and he feels queasy even saying them, thoughts skittering away from the images his mind conjures up. 

“Maybe some places do,” Leonard acknowledges. “Maybe some labs use experimentation as a last resort, and only when it is a dire need for humans.” He taps the file. “Not GenTech.” 

Barry frowns and opens the file. 

“We’re going to steal us some puppies,” Leonard says after giving Barry a few beats to skim the contents. “And maybe get enough evidence so that they never do this again.” 

Barry snaps the folder closed and looks up at the thief with wild, horrified eyes. “We can stop this?” He asks. “Really?” 

“Really,” Leonard says, his Cheshire cat smile slowly curling his mouth. 

“Alright,” Barry says, jaw clenched, gripping the folder with white knuckles. “We don’t hurt anyone. You take the deal afterwards. Agreed?” 

Barry wonders if Leonard realizes that Barry’s going into that building and rescuing those dogs even if he _doesn’t_ have the professional guidance of a thief. 

“Agreed.” 

“Then let’s get these bastards.” 

*

They approach GenTech at a little after two in the morning, plan firmly in place. What follows is two and a half hours of _absolute, nerve-wracking chaos_. The worst thing is, Leonard even warned him: 

“First rule of theft club—” 

“That’s not a thing,” Barry huffs. 

“Make the plan,” Leonard ignores him as he ties a cloth around Barry’s neck that will serve as extra identity-concealment in addition to a hat and a zipped-up high collar on his jacket. “Execute the plan. Expect the plan to go off the rails. Throw away the plan.” 

“That was _four_ things. Also, it sounds like you need a better plan to start with.” 

Once they get going, it starts off innocuously enough: 

“Is upper body strength a requirement for criminals in general or just thieves?” Barry asks, panting with aching arms. “And is it really necessary to _scale up the side of the building_ like we’re in a _Mission Impossible_ movie?” 

“No, not really. It’s just cool.” 

“Seriously? I’m dying here. Have you seen my arms? I also have, like, zero core strength.” 

“I wanted to give you the full thieving experience, Barry.” 

With only a slight hiccup at the start: 

“That guard isn’t where he’s supposed to be,” Leonard whispers from where _they’re hiding in a freaking broom closet_. Barry wasn’t even aware that a broom closet was a real thing outside of cartoons and campy TV tropes. 

“I’m going to get fired,” Barry whispers, tugging harshly on Leonard’s sleeve. “Singh is going to _kill me_. _What the hell am I doing here?_ ” 

“Existentially, or—?” 

Barry hisses incoherently at him. Leonard smirks.

“You won’t get caught. Thief’s honor.” 

_“That’s not a thing!”_

And then it’s smooth sailing. They get evidence of the animal abuse (Barry refuses to leave behind any forensic evidence and thus heroically resists the urge to throw up when he sees the relevant pictures and documents). They even arrange for the truck and the loading of the eighty-six Beagles onto said truck. 

And then, somehow, there’s gunfire and a lot of running and they end up dangling in an empty elevator shaft on the complete opposite side of their planned exit where they cling to their lives by a thin thread. Literally. Barry’s not sure where Leonard got the rope from, but it’s worryingly thin. Unless Leonard had Elven rope in his pocket, Barry’s not sure it’s going to hold them both much longer. 

“You want me to _what?_ ” Leonard grits out indignantly. 

“You heard me—you have to lose the boots first. And then, you just, you know… swing yourself over to the panel.”

“That is twenty feet away!” 

“OK, yes. Well, twenty- _five_ feet… OK. There’s no need for your grumpy cat face, Leonard.” 

_“Grumpy cat—?”_

“Look, you just have to lose the approximate weight your of shoes and then swing us enough so you accelerate at the appropriate speed when you jump. My added weight should help with—” 

_“Should?”_

“ _Will_ help with gaining enough momentum. And then it’s just physics from there. See? It’s _science_. Completely factual and reliable.” 

“So was phrenology and cold fusion,” Leonard grumbles. Barry blinks before shaking his head, refusing to be impressed by Leonard’s knowledge of superseded scientific theories when _they are about to die_. 

“Also, I didn’t know I had to be _Bruce Willis_ to go on this freaking heist with you,” Barry feels himself slipping and struggles to pull himself up further on the rope. “And I don’t think I can hold on for much longer. And if I fall then I will get caught—because I’ll be _dead_ or _maimed_. And you told me I wouldn’t get caught. You _swore_ on your thief’s honor.” 

“That’s not a real thing,” Leonard mutters as he kicks off his boots.

In the end, it takes a stolen taser, a fire ( _“this one isn’t my fault!”_ ), a wig (“no, really Leonard, where the fuck did that come from?”), and a paperclip to finally escape the lab with all eighty-six Beagle puppies safe and sound. 

It’s an adrenaline rush that Barry’s never quite felt before. As Leonard drives the truck past the perimeter of GenTech’s property, Barry tilts his head back against his seat and presses his palm against his forehead, trying to capture his thoughts there before they fly away. “Oh my God, I can’t believe we did that.” 

“Not bad, rookie,” Leonard smirks over at him just as the first rays of sun make the inside of the truck cab glow a golden amber. 

“Crime’s my jam,” Barry responds. Leonard snorts. And then chuckles. And that’s all it takes for the hysterical laughter building in them both to finally erupt. Barry laughs until his vision is blurry with unshed tears. 

Next to him, Len tips his head back and laughs, too. 

*

Turns out that Len had been contracted out by a third party, an animal rescue group. They meet just outside of Keystone to exchange the puppies and the pertinent files they took from GenTech for the payout. 

“Do you do that often? Mercenary theft?” Barry whispers as they walk up to a man several years older than Leonard with sun-baked skin and muddy green eyes. 

“I do what I want for who I want,” Len declares with a sniff. 

“I’m not calling your autonomy into question or anything like that,” Barry sighs while rolling his eyes. 

“Thanks, Snart,” the contractee says as he hands over an actual suitcase full of money without blinking an eye. 

“My pleasure,” Len drawls, handing over the thumb drive Barry made.

“Look,” Barry says, gaining the intense expressions of both Len and the contractee. “There were probably some employees there who didn’t know about what GenTech was doing, or they knew and cared but were too afraid to do something about it. I’m just saying that some people’s _livelihoods_ may be at stake, and…” 

The contractee smiles crookedly, holding up a hand. “Woah there, son. That’s not our plan. GenTech does some good work, and they have some good people there—we know, because some of us infiltrated the place for a few months. We just want them to stop with the animal experimentations. I promise, kid.” 

“OK,” Barry says, expelling a breath. “OK. What now? What happens to the dogs?”

“Well, they need a lot of care. A lot of rehab. Maybe most of them will be able to be part of someone’s family someday. Our experts think that a few of the dogs are about ready to be let out into the sunshine and grass for the first time in their lives. You want to see?” 

“Yes!” Barry grins. 

The man walks off and Barry goes to follow but is stopped when Len's long fingers wrap around his wrist. “Hold up, Barry. A deal’s a deal.” He reaches into his coat and pulls out a box of Pop Tarts before placing it in Barry’s hands. It’s Blue Raspberry, one of Barry’s favorites (right up there with Red Velvet and Chocolatey Strawberry). 

“Does this mean…?” 

“Symbolism is completely lost on you, isn’t it kid? Kind of tragic.”

Barry smiles at him, contemplatively taking in Len's features. He looks the same to Barry and yet he can’t help but feel like there’s something different. Something he missed. “Thanks, Len.” 

The thief rolls his eyes. “For what, exactly? For agreeing to your ridiculous but ballsy deal? Or the heist part? Or the rescuing a bunch of, admittedly cute, puppies? Or the part where you got to set another fire?” 

_“That one wasn’t my fault!”_

“Or the part where you almost died?” Len finishes softly. 

Barry shrugs. “All of it. None of it. Just. Thanks.” Their eyes finally meet and Barry finds himself leaning slightly into the older man. 

“Hey, kid!” Their contractee calls from some distance away. “You ready?” 

“Gotta go,” Barry whispers to Len. “Puppies.” Then he turns and jogs toward the other man. 

Barry ends up laying on his belly in front of several kennels as the animal rescuers gently, slowly, and quietly open the cage doors. Little black noses poke out into the sunlight, all of the puppies hesitating when faced with such a big and bright world for the first time. Their wide, wet eyes absolutely tear Barry apart. 

But one puppy doesn’t seem interested in waiting. She barrels out, head first and too fast, so she ends up stumbling and rolling out into the world. She buries her face in the grass, tail slowly starting to wag, little body shaking as he takes a couple of slow, tentative steps until she runs into Barry’s arm. The little puppy hesitates, presses her nose to Barry’s skin, and looks up to stare for one long minute in which Barry falls hard and fast in love with her. 

And then her attention is drawn to his Pop Tart box. She knocks it down and starts gnawing at the corner, tail wagging furiously now. Barry chuckles, delighted, and lays his head on his arm to watch, heart breaking to see her discordant motor skills and her fierce, fierce joy. Another puppy waddles shakily up to him and starts to lavish his face with little puppy kisses. Another stumbles to him. And another. 

Eventually, after several minutes of wriggling around in a literal dog pile of Beagle puppies, Barry looks up to find Len. The thief is standing alone, arms crossed, his mouth twisted into that ridiculously adorable self-satisfied smirk. But his eyes are soft and unfathomable as he stares at Barry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [You Can Call Me Betty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480943) is an awesome tag to this chapter by Tobyaudax. Read it!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Len continues to date Barry. Barry, bless his heart, continues to not really notice. 
> 
> (There’s kissing, so at least there’s that.)

Turns out a _Supernatural_ marathon-slash-drinking game with Lisa Snart was the singularly worst mistake Barry’s ever made in his life. 

“You suck,” Barry whimpers as he tries to duck his head further into the shell of his hoodie. He reaches to weakly push his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose before curling back in to himself. 

“Stop yelling.” Lisa, for once, fares little better. Her hair is in a haphazard bun instead of the meticulously styled waves. She only has on minimum makeup, and sunglasses cover the fact that she didn’t even bother with eyeliner and mascara. She is also trying to disappear in one of Barry’s hoodies that she pilfered from his closet at some indeterminable time between last night and this morning. 

They’re on the lake’s boardwalk at The Skillet, a restaurant specializing in brunch, notably omelets and mimosas. They’re the only ones on the patio, which is good, because they’re making a spectacle with how pathetic they are. 

“Not yelling. Also, your rights are…” he trails off, mind sluggish and exhausted. “Revoted? No. Revoked? You’re not allowed to choose what we do on Friday nights _ever again._ ”

Lisa rolls her head toward him for a retort but hisses vampirically when the sun hits her face. 

“You suck,” Barry reiterates. 

“Shut up,” Lisa begs. “Your voice hurts.” 

“Good.” Barry says, savagely, and then whimpers again when his head starts doing a hammer-and-anvil impression. “I haven’t thrown up that much since college.” 

“Ew.” Lisa clutches at her stomach. “Don’t ruin my omelets, Sammy.” 

Barry smirks _evilly_ and responds with a casual, “Seriously?” On cue, Lisa shudders. Last night, she’d had to take two drinks every time a character said, _“Seriously?”_ (Which turned out to be _a lot_ of times.) 

“Why are we here?” Barry whines. “I want to go back to bed.” 

“Omelets.” 

Barry’s not sure if he’s going to throw up or if he’s _fucking starving_. “Never again,” he swears. “ _Told you_ that we should’ve played Monopoly. Less misery and humiliation.” 

“No,” Lisa pouts, but much weaker than the argument she’d thrown up last night when she countered Barry’s ‘Monopoly and _Supernatural_ ’ proposal with ‘ _Supernatural_ Drinking Game.’ “We’re not. Because we’re not ninety-year-old men in cardigans.” 

“Ninety-year-old men don’t have the market on Monopoly and cardigans,” Barry mutters, hurt. “I like cardigans.” 

“Here are your omelets,” a peppy server, appearing suddenly from the ether, exclaims as he lowers the plates on the table with no less than a sonorous crash. Lisa slaps her hands over her ears and resumes her incoherent vampire noises. 

“Thanks,” Barry manages, pained. 

“My pleasure! Hope your meal is _egg_ cellent. And remember: ‘Stay on the sunny side up’!” 

“Uhm. Will do?” Under the table, Barry’s hand snatches Lisa’s wrist when she goes for her pistol. “Murder is loud,” he whispers at her as the waiter leaves. And, after further consideration, he adds, “and _wrong_.” 

“Omelets,” she answers, because apparently she has a one-track mind when she’s hungover. 

At the first bite, Barry’s sure he’s going to be sick. And then he realizes that he has an _actual black hole_ where his stomach usually is and inhales the rest. When they’re done and on their second cup of coffee and a little more desensitized to sunlight and sounds, Lisa props up her booted feet onto a vacant chair and says, “So. You and Lenny.” 

_Act cool, Barry._ “Y-Yeah?” He squeaks. “W-What about Lenny—er—Len?” _Damn it._

“He took you to see fireworks a few nights ago.” 

“What? I wouldn’t say he _took_ me. We just sort of ended up there.” 

“You bailed on me _again_ to go with him to fireworks.” 

“ _I didn’t know that’s what we were doing,_ ” he defends for literally the thousandth time in the past fourteen hours. “He just… _showed up_ next to me on the bus I was taking— _again_ —and we ended up at the show. And it turned out to be a good thing, didn’t it?” He accuses, sorely. “That was a work night. You would’ve gotten me _fired_ if we did the stupid game then.”

“Don’t blame _me_ for your own life choices, Sam.” She sips at her coffee, fingers hidden by the sleeves of his hoodie as her sunglasses peer into him from over the mug. Finally, she continues. “You bought him breakfast yesterday morning.” 

“Well, yeah? I’d just gotten off from a night shift and I was starving and _since he was loitering outside of the police station anyway_ , I made him keep me company at Jitters.” 

“You _paid_ for his breakfast,” she emphasizes, like it means something. _(It did. Didn't it? Maybe it didn't.)_

“I’m about to pay for _your_ breakfast. Because you said, and I quote, ‘Buy me omelets, Sammy, or I’ll post that video of you I took last night all over social media’,” Barry reminds her in deadpan, or tries to. He also tries to hide the fact that he’s picking at the frayed hole in his jeans. _(Was it weird that he had paid for breakfast? Is he getting it all wrong?)_

“So Lenny blackmailed you into buying him breakfast, too?” 

“What? No.” 

Lisa hums, but doesn’t say anything else. Barry casts about, desperate to turn off his brain, when he sees the sun glinting off of Lisa’s Lexus in the parking lot. 

“…Lisa?” 

“Mm?” 

“That car you drove us in this morning…” 

Lisa’s smile is saccharine and immaculate. “Yes?” 

“That’s not the car you drove last week.” 

“Oh?” 

“…Or the car you drove the week before.” 

“That’s weird.” 

“…Lisa?”

“Mm?” 

“Didn’t you ride a motorcycle to my apartment last night?” 

*

A few days later Barry storms through his apartment in a huff, letting his work bag and jacket slide from his shoulders to land carelessly on the floor. He goes straight to the window, opens it, and crawls through onto the fire escape. 

“Mick,” he calls down. “You stole my _UFO Magazine_ … again.” 

On the landing below Barry’s, he can hear a grunt. Through the slats of the fire escape he can make out movement. 

Finally, “’s not stealin’, Kit. It’s borrowing.” 

Barry raises his eyebrows and walks down the flight of stairs, sitting on the last few steps so he can see Mick. “Are you finally talking to me again?” 

“I wasn’t _not_ talking to you,” Mick points out. 

“No, you definitely weren’t talking to me. Except in grunts and hand gestures that required a parental advisory warning.” 

“You started a fire when I wasn’t there.” 

“I didn’t start the fire,” Barry groans, running a hand down his face. Mick frowns. “Okay,” Barry concedes. “I started it.”

Mick _glares_. 

“… but only a little!” 

“That’s the whole reason I’ve been following you around, Kit,” Mick grumbles. “And your dumbass starts one without me… why are you smiling?” The criminal narrows his eyes suspiciously. 

Barry _is_ smiling, actually, with a sort of exasperated fondness that surprises even him. “No reason,” he says. “Where’d you get the popcorn? Better not have been in my apartment.” 

Mick is set up on the tiny metal landing with a chair, a table on which his tablet is propped, and another table for his beer. He has a bag of popcorn on his lap. 

“‘Course not,” Mick says, pointing vaguely toward the street. “Got it from the gas station. I know the rules.” 

Barry frowns. “Rules?” 

“Yeah, Kit,” Mick shrugs. “The rules. No home invasions. No breaking into the Kit’s apartment. Don’t hurt anyone.” 

Barry opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He doesn’t even know where to start with that, much less the questions he wants to ask. So he goes with, “you done with the magazine?” 

Mick wipes the butter and salt on his hand off on his shirt and reaches down into the bag beside him, brandishing _UFO Magazine_. “Page 32 has a good story,” Mick says as he hands it over. 

“I didn’t think you’d be into this sort of thing.” 

“What? Reading?” Mick snorts a little defensively. 

“…No?” Barry blinks, waves the magazine. “UFO stuff. Most people don’t believe in it, or think it’s stupid to read about it.” 

Mick chews on his popcorn almost thoughtfully. “I think ninjas are real,” he admits. “Like actual ninjas—not people who can just do ninja-like tricks and shit. But a lot of people don’t believe that, either. Lise called me a nerd.” 

Barry laughs a little, imagining Lisa’s unimpressed look. “What does, uhm, Len think?” 

Mick raises his eyebrows. “…Of ninjas?” 

Barry suddenly finds his shoelaces _fascinating_. “Yeah, of ninjas.” 

“…Kit, are you meaning ninjas as in ninjas or ninjas as in another thing that is not really ninjas?”

Barry tilts his head, but tries to keep his eyesight mostly on his shoes in an attempt to shadow the rising heat in his cheeks. “Are you talking about a metaphor?” 

The thief snaps his fingers, his face spreading into a brief, happy grin. “That’s it! Metaphor. I forget words sometimes. So are you asking what Snart thinks of ninjas or what Snart thinks of _ninjas_ —ninjas being a completely obscure metaphor for something else?”

Barry laughs nervously. “What… completely obscure metaphor? I’m just, you know. Talking about actual ninjas.” Barry starts casually flipping through _UFO Magazine_. 

“That's upside down, kid.” 

Barry scrambles to upright the magazine and starts casually flipping through it _even harder_. 

“Well,” Mick finally grunts. “I haven’t really talked to Snart about ninjas before.” 

“Oh,” Barry nods, starts to roll and unroll the magazine. 

“But,” Mick adds, causing Barry to look up at him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he, uh, believed in… ninjas. The bastard always did want things he couldn’t have, or chased after something that was too good for him.” 

Barry’s eyes widened. “…Are we still talking about ninjas? Or metaphors?” And exactly _what_ metaphor were they talking about? Did ninjas stand for, _Snart likes other guys?_ Or did it mean, _Snart likes Barry?_ Or maybe it meant, you know, _ninjas_.

_This_ is why Barry chose the science field. Literary devices left too much up to interpretation. 

Mick shrugs again, apparently done with the conversation. Barry sighs. 

“What are you watching?” 

“ _Matrix._ Wanna watch?” 

Barry thinks of the files he brought home, of the blog he needs to update, of the strange cases in Savannah and New Orleans that popped up on his news feed today. But he decides to say, “Sure.” 

He goes back upstairs and gets a small chair and a bowl. They somehow squeeze two chairs on the landing. Mick puts some of his popcorn into Barry’s bowl and pushes “play” on the tablet. 

“I love this movie,” Barry says. 

“It’s pretty good,” Mick concedes. “Lot of groundbreaking cinematography in this one.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like the ‘bullet time’ slow motion dolly shot. Did you know that there were about one-hundred and forty-four shots in the two hundred and ninety-four-second subway action scene?” 

Barry’s shoulders relax and he smiles around a mouthful of popcorn. 

*

“You’re mopey,” Iris announces as she kicks her feet up on the table and pokes at her sweet and sour pork. 

“You’re…” Barry struggles to find a comeback, or at least a believable dodge, and fails. “Your _face_ is mopey.” _Burn._ He leans so he’s balancing on the back legs of his chair as he shovels in more chow mein in a zealous effort to eat his feelings. 

Iris rolls her eyes but tugs him by his hair until she’s able to place an affectionate kiss on the top of his head. “See? You get all pouty when you’re mopey.” 

“I- _ris_ ,” he whines. 

“And whiney. The whiney part isn’t cute, though.” 

“I’m the _cutest_ ,” Barry insists. 

“Cute as a button,” she agrees easily, ruffling his hair. “Tell me what’s up?” 

Barry opens his mouth to tell her about Len, hesitates, changes gears. “I want a dog.”

“…It’s like you were actually body-snatched by a five-year-old,” she marvels. 

“No, I’m serious. There’s this… rescue dog I met at this, uh—p-place outside of Central. A Beagle puppy. I’ve been visiting her for the past couple of weeks while she’s undergoing rehabilitation at the foster home. But she’s almost ready to move to an adoptive family, probably somewhere in Oklahoma.” 

“Is that where you’ve been disappearing to every Wednesday and Saturday?” Iris grins. “Thought you were meeting up with someone and keeping it a secret from me.” 

Barry twirls chow mien around his chopsticks, lifts it, lets the noodles slide back into the carton. Repeats. 

_“Bartholomew,”_ Iris gasps. 

“ _Not_ the full name,” Barry groans beseechingly. 

“But you haven’t told me, again, that you’re seeing someone. _Bartholomew._ ” This time, her tone has a note of hurt. 

“It’s not like that,” Barry hurries to say. “At least I don’t _think_ it is. Maybe. We just… hang out a lot? And, uhm. It’s…” he waves his chopsticks around in a gesture that does very little to communicate, _'he’s a criminal and I work with the police but I don’t actually care except that I wonder if I should care that I don’t? I mean I guess I care, in a way, and how would this even work, anyway?'_ “…complicated. Like.” He makes a another gesture to indicate, _'and I’m reading way too far into it, anyway. I’m just this weird side project that he once felt obligated to.'_ And he ends with a plaintive hand motion that should hopefully depict, _'But. Puppies. Coffee. Fireworks.'_

Iris blinks at him and then says, slowly, “Barr… I have no idea what all of that hand waving was supposed to mean.” 

“Oh,” Barry sighs, slumping a little. He doesn’t know what it all means, either. That’s sort of the problem. “Do you mind if we just talk about the dog for now? Because there _really_ is a dog. And I _really_ have been visiting her the past few weeks. And I think yesterday was the last day I’m ever going to see her.” 

Iris is quiet for a long, long time. Barry suspects that she’s trying to determine what level of physical effort is currently required to get more information out of him. Apparently, she decides that it requires no less than a Full Nelson, and thus elects to forgo this tactic while they’re in the middle of the police precinct. “OK,” she says finally. “But you know you can tell me anything, right?” 

Barry nods emphatically and makes a mental note to avoid Iris—and Full Nelsons—for the next few days by sticking to very public places. 

“Anyway,” he says. “This dog… they even let me name her—Blue. After Blue Raspberry Pop Tarts.” 

Iris’s concerned look finally relaxes as she rolls her eyes. “Honestly, Barry. You have to do something about that Pop Tart addiction.” 

The Beagle puppy in question was the one who’d first tripped into the sunlight and ferociously tackled Barry’s Pop Tart box in her first five minutes of freedom while her compatriots had been a little more hesitant. He’d really named her “Iris,” because the puppy was as much of a wrecking ball as her namesake. But he wasn’t sure Iris would appreciate the sentiment as much, if she ever found out, so he’d settled for “Blue Iris” instead. Blue for short.

“Seems like you’re really kind of bummed about this,” Iris says, the troubled frown returning. “I’m so sorry, Barr. Why don’t you adopt her?” 

Barry sighs, stabs at his noodles. “I thought about it, but I’m just at work so much. And she’s such a brave girl, but she’s still afraid of a lot of things, still learning a lot of things, and it wouldn’t be fair to leave her alone so much.” 

“Aw, Barr,” Iris sighs. 

Just then the door swings opens. Joe blinks at them. “What… are you two doing?”

“Brainstorming for my next assignment,” Iris says immediately. 

Which is unfortunate, because at the exact same time Barry says, “hiding from Captain Singh?” 

Joe frowns and serves them his You Lying Little Shits™ face. Iris punches Barry in the shoulder, who teeters dangerously on his precariously balanced chair and has to grip the table to keep from falling over. 

“…In the interrogation room?” Joe asks. 

“It’s quiet so I can get more work done,” Iris defends, obdurately sticking to her story like a captain going down with a sinking ship. 

“Singh probably won’t think to look for me here for a while,” Barry reasons. 

Joe runs his hand over his face, _hopefully_ to hide a smile. He steps to the side, making shooing motions. “Out. This isn’t a break room. And I have an actual interrogation to do.” 

Iris sweeps her legs off the table and Barry plops forward before standing. They elbow each other as they gather their food and bags. On the way out they pass Joe and the man he’s intending on interrogating—tall, broad shoulders, shaggy hair. Detective Chyre is just behind him with a hand on the suspect’s shoulder. 

Iris passes by without incident, and Barry’s mouth is just opening to offer a doomed farewell to Joe—after all, he’ll be dead once Singh finds him—when the suspect suddenly moves. His handcuffed fists slam into Barry’s stomach and Barry, unprepared, loses his breath and his balance, stumbling into the wall before he falls down completely. 

The suspect makes to step toward Barry, but Joe is on him, slamming him into the wall with adrenaline-fueled ferocity. The suspect bucks against Joe once, but Chyre throws his weight against the man as well. 

“What the hell are you doing, man?” Chyre asks, his words almost casual even as he strains against the suspect. Joe the Mama Bear only bares his teeth and curses inarticulately under his breath. Iris scrambles to help Barry stand and move out of their vicinity as two more officers rush past them to offer assistance. However, the suspect suddenly relaxes, almost throwing Chyre and Joe off balance with the sudden change. 

“Sorry,” the man spits, smiling nastily while glaring directly at Barry. “Must’ve slipped.” 

“Go on, guys,” Chyre says to Barry and Iris while he and Joe wrestle the suspect into the interrogation room. Joe casts a worried glance over his shoulder, to which Barry waves off. 

The door shuts, a barrier between him and the unknown suspect, and Barry winces as he cups his hand over his bruised stomach. 

“What the hell was that about, Barry?” Iris whispers. The expression on her face is fury incarnate, but he feels her terrified pulse racing against his when she reaches down to clutch his other hand tightly. 

Barry stares at the closed door, baffled. “I have no idea.” 

*

Regrettably, Barry’s violent encounter with the suspect seems to remind Joe that Barry is, on the whole, pretty terrible at self-defense. And also really kind of bad at violence in general. This inspires Joe to renew his heretofore miserable efforts at Teaching Barry to Throw a Goddamned Punch. Barry estimates that this is the eighty-fifth time Joe has tackled the enormous task. At least. When he shares this insight with Joe, his foster dad rolls his eyes, calls him dramatic, and contends that this is only the fifth or sixth attempt. 

Five or six times too many, in Barry’s opinion. 

Barry supposes that he should be thankful that Joe first gave him a twenty-four hour reprieve. But this just means that the bruising to his stomach has had time to darken and get sore. Not that he’s going to tell Joe this, though he does tell Iris, but only because she makes him when she ambushes him at his apartment the morning after the incident.

Well, she doesn’t _make_ him. More like, she does the brief-knock-barge-in-to-Barry’s-apartment thing, armed with her scary face and clearly intending to put him into that ominous Full Nelson to get more information out of him about Len. She’s even wearing work-out clothes for better range of motion. But then she sees Barry standing barefoot in front of his couch, watching the news and eating cereal, spoon halfway to his mouth and still only in his sleep pants so the blooming bruise from yesterday is clearly visible. 

Iris takes one look at his bruise and his tired, confused smile and abruptly changes gears. She coos at the bruise, pokes at it ( _“ow, Iris!”_ ), and purses her lips thoughtfully. Barry might’ve been embarrassed at the attention, except he’s mostly in admiration of Iris’s muttered, explicative-peppered diatribe against the unnamed suspect, his manhood, and his parentage as she makes Barry hot chocolate (peanut butter hot chocolate… he keeps the ingredients readily on hand, always hoping that Iris will come by and make it). And, since Barry only has to go in to the precinct for a few hours later that afternoon, she directs them to the couch, where they tangle themselves up in a pile of blankets and settle in for Netflix and chill. 

“Hot chocolate doesn’t fix bruises, you know,” Barry points out.

“Do you feel better?” 

“Well, yeah, I guess.” 

“Then it works.” 

Watching _Planet Earth_ and sipping hot chocolate, Iris lures Barry into a false sense of security before she finally asks. “…Hey, Barr?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Tell me? About the girl you’re crushing on?” 

Barry debates an “it’s not a crush” protestation before nixing it just as quickly.

"What... if it's not? A girl?"

She reaches over, finds his hand under the blanket, and squeezes. "You can tell me _anything_ ," she swears with such a relentless strength that he finds himself squeezing her hand back, hopeful. In the end, he kind of really, really _wants_ to tell Iris. Everything. Or, well. Mostly everything. 

So he does. 

And now it’s early evening and Joe has successfully wrangled Barry to the gym a few buildings down from the precinct. The gym itself is old, made of poor lighting and aging mats, and claims members of Central City’s Police Department—both current and retired—as its largest percentage of clientele. 

The whole ordeal goes about as well as can be expected, involving a lot of sass on Barry’s part, eye-rolling on Joe’s, and a paltry amount of actual Punching Things due to their bickering. Thankfully, for Barry and Joe as well as the sanity of the gym’s other patrons, it only lasts about fifteen minutes before an old cop friend or three of Joe’s walks up and claps Joe on the back. From there, it takes about five seconds before the group launches into gleeful “remember whens” and starts discussing drinks at the closest bar. 

Barry reserves one moment to be thankful for the grin on Joe’s face, glad to see the man genuinely smile—he’d been looking beleaguered and bitter lately with some of his recent cases. Added to that, he’d also been a mix of worried and guilty since the suspect had gone after Iris and Barry at the precinct yesterday. 

But Barry doesn’t let his happiness for Joe distract him from getting the hell out of there. 

He edges as inconspicuously as possible toward the side entrance—the front entrance will put him directly in Joe’s line of sight, and Barry judges that it’s too soon to inadvertently remind Joe of his presence—and slips out. 

And runs right into Len. 

The gym door closes behind him. Barry blinks. “If I asked you a question, would you give me an honest answer?” 

Len frowns, crosses his arms, rubs his thumb up and down his jawline in thought. 

“That’s too long!” 

“No, no, I’m _thinking_ ,” Len defends. 

Barry rolls his eyes and checks his clothes, shoes, and bag for probably the millionth time. “Just tell me. Have you planted a tracker on me somehow?” 

“There isn’t a tracker. I don’t think so, anyway. Well,” he adds after some thought. “If there is, _I_ didn’t do it.” 

“ _Mick._ ” 

“He’s been relentless,” Len agrees. “Something about missing the last fire you started.” 

_“It wasn’t my fault that time!”_

“…It’s telling that you have to quantify your statement with the words, ‘that time’.” 

“I know! But they weren’t my fault—OK,” Barry concedes with a grimace at Len’s look. “The first one was _sort of_ my fault. It was an _accident_. I can’t believe that they’re calling me—" he breaks off, glances around nervously, and whispers, “—you know. ‘The Chemist’.” 

Len _scowls aggressively_ , hunches his shoulders, and crosses his arms. Barry blinks, stunned at the telegraphed body language and also at the sudden insight. “Oh my God!” He laughs, slapping a hand over his mouth in a vain effort to cover it. “You’re jealous that they gave _me_ a _criminal moniker_!” 

“I’ve been ‘in the _biz_ ,’ you might say, for almost my whole life,” Len grumbles. “And it’s still just ‘Snart’.” 

Barry’s grinning so hard it actually _hurts_. 

(Also, a scowl like that shouldn’t be so adorable on a grown man, but, well… Len’s a lot of things he shouldn’t be to Barry.) 

“So,” Barry does his best to drawl like Len but it’s completely ruined by another laugh. “You’re saying that _I’ve_ gained more notoriety in the past couple of months than you have _your whole life_? Does this mean that I’m a _better_ criminal than you are?” 

“It _means_ that you’re too flashy.” 

“Says the man who scaled up a building because he thought it looked _cool_ …” Barry trails off when he hears voices pass by on the other side of the gym door. He’s pretty sure it’s not Joe but his eyes widen and he hurries past Len, reaching down to grab his wrist and pull him along a few steps. “So!” he says, brightly. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you since you showed up at my testimony _at the freaking courthouse, Len, Jesus Christ_ two days ago.” 

“Are you saying that you missed me?” Barry can _hear_ his smirk. But before Barry can choke on an answer, Len continues with, “Why are we running away from the gym?” 

“Joe’s trying to teach me self-defense,” Barry grumbles. “Well, I guess he’s trying to teach me _offense_. Again.” 

“Again?” 

“Punching people is hard, OK?” 

“Does he know that you took out a Santini hitman in ten seconds flat?” 

“Really?” Barry asks. “It felt longer than that. And, no. Unless I want to incriminate myself as ‘The Chemist’.” 

Len huffs petulantly at the name. Barry hides a smile. 

“Anyway, Joe periodically tries to ‘toughen me up’. And since I got kicked in the face a few weeks ago and that guy yesterday—”

“What guy yesterday?” 

“Oh, some rando at the precinct got loose for a second and I was the closest target.” Barry lifts his gray workout t-shirt to show the bruise on his stomach. He goes to drop the material but Len’s long fingers stop him. Startled, Barry stops, looking over his shoulder to see a blank look on the older man’s face. “Len?” 

The man blinks, long lashes catching the sunlight before hard blue eyes flick up to his. “I was under the impression that working as a CSI was relatively safe,” he says measuredly as he finally releases Barry’s shirt. 

“It, uhm,” Barry tries to respond, he really does, but he’s too busy noticing that both of his hands are now touching Len’s (how did that happen, he wonders). 

Len only raises his eyebrows, a familiar calculated look creeping into his features. Len wears that look around Barry a lot, he realizes. Like he’s studying Barry’s every move, waiting for Barry to give some cue. 

“Sushi,” Barry blurts out. Len’s eyebrows climb higher. “Yep. I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Sushi sounds good. Or, uhm. Burgers, maybe.” 

Len lets go of his hands, steps back. Barry suddenly feels adrift and jittery, so he crosses his arms over his stomach, fingers clutching the sides of his shirt. “I could eat,” Len says, finally. “But I had something else in mind.” 

“Oh,” Barry nods. “That’s, uhm. Cool. I—guess I’ll…” 

“Follow me?” Len asks, and reaches his hand out once again, backing deeper into the alley. “It’s on the other side of this block.” 

Barry lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, some timidity inside of him relaxing and clenching tighter at the same time. He tries not to overthink it when he grabs Len’s hand and follows him through a maze of back alleys until they come out and cross the road into a little park. 

(Barry does, however, think a lot about hands in general and Len’s hands specifically.)

“What are we doing?” Barry asks. 

“We’re getting something to eat.” 

“Where—? Not Stan’s Hot Dog Stand, right? That guy has so many health violations… Lisa!” He beams because now he sees where she’s sitting on top of a picnic table underneath one of the bigger, older trees in the small park. There’s a battered cooler on the ground and the sweating beer in Lisa’s hand indicates what’s probably in it. A big bag from the sub sandwich place across the street rests beside her. And there’s also…

Barry stops. 

Blue Iris, the Beagle puppy from GenTech, bounds from where she was nosing curiously at the battered cooler, her tail and body wiggling so furiously she can barely run straight. Barry makes a truly embarrassing, high-pitched noise and drops to his knees for her. She rears up on her hind legs, bracing against his chest, and licks his face. He wraps his arms around her and makes even more embarrassing baby talk sounds. 

“Oh my God, what are you doing here—what’s she doing here?” 

Len shrugs, nonchalant. “I was told that she was done with the foster family and that you’d make a good adoptive home.” 

They make their way to the table, Len sitting on the bench near Lisa's legs while Barry plops on the grass so Blue can run and trip around him. He taps her nose with his fingers, which she promptly pounces so she can gnaw at his knuckles. 

“You’re giving me cavities, Sammy,” Lisa sighs, reaching into the bag and throwing a sub sandwich at his head. “Happy Birthday, by the way.” 

“What?” 

“Your birthday,” Lisa throws a bag of chips at his face, which he misses, causing her to laugh, supremely amused. Next she tries tossing his beer at him, which Barry flails and just manages to catch, not wanting to re-break his face. 

“That was a while ago,” he says, squinting his eyes at her suspiciously. He unwraps his sandwich and suddenly has to fend off eleven pounds of gangly but determined Beagle puppy. Len huffs at them, reaching down to take Barry’s beer and chips so he has a free hand to distract Blue from his sandwich. 

“Like a couple of weeks after we met, turns out,” Lisa continues. “Before we went to Texas. Birthdays are a big fucking deal, Sam. It’s a time during the year where you get free shit. You always have this starving scientist motif going on, so I got you dinner. Lenny got you a puppy.” 

“ _I_ didn’t get you the dog,” Len interjects, frowning at his sister. 

“Well, _I_ didn’t,” Lisa quips back, unfazed. “ _I_ also didn’t drive out past Keystone, pick her up, buy her a doggy bed, food, dishes, and toys, so. It was Lenny,” she announces, tilting her head at her brother, but grins at Barry, the delighted mischief in the curve of her mouth making her seem girlish. “He _claims_ he doesn’t like birthdays, though.” 

“Birthdays are for children,” Len insists with a grimace.

“The fourteen-karat necklace with the LeVian chocolate diamonds you got me this year says differently.” 

“ _Shut up,_ Train Wreck.”

Barry, who’s cased a surprising amount of robberies in his short career as a CSI, knows just about how much those necklaces run. He also suspects that Len didn’t necessarily _buy_ such a necklace. 

“We have _no idea_ what they’re talking about, do we?” He asks the dog, _sotto voce_ , as he gives her a piece of the grilled chicken from his sandwich. “So we can’t be complicit in any crimes. Know why? Because we’re just too pretty to go to jail, Blue.” 

Len rolls his eyes and scoffs, opening his beer. “You’re one of _those_ dog people.” 

“It’s like watching _two_ puppies,” Lisa adds, taking out her phone to snap a photo of Barry making ridiculous duck-lip faces at Blue. 

“Thanks for dinner, Lise,” Barry says as he playfully taps Blue’s nose again. “Thank you, Len.” Barry smiles up at him. Something startled and complicated briefly shudders behind Len’s eyes before he seems to blink it away and take a long pull of his beer. 

“I don’t know, though,” Barry continues, balling up the sandwich wrapper and laughing sadly when Blue plops onto her back in clear invitation for him to rub her belly. “I want her more than anything, but I live alone, and I work odd hours. Sometimes really long hours. I don’t want to be another cage.” 

It’s quiet for a few seconds and when he glances back up at the siblings, Lisa casts him a crooked smile usually more befitting of her brother. Len is looking at him much the same way he had a couple of weeks ago after the GenTech heist, and when he kidnapped Barry to watch fireworks, and when Barry had invited him to breakfast. It’s the only expression Barry’s ever seen on the other man that doesn’t have traces of shrewdness or anger. Instead, it’s almost wistful. 

“You’re unreal, Barry Allen,” Lisa says. 

Barry crinkles a brow, tilting his head questioningly, but she doesn’t elaborate. 

“A little birdie told us that you were worried about your work hours,” Len says as he hands Barry’s beer back down to him. 

“He means Mick,” Lisa fills in. 

Barry makes a face because he didn’t ever think he’d associate _Mick Rory_ with the phrase _little birdie_. “What? How did _he_ know? Is there a bug planted somewhere beside that tracker?” 

Lisa seems confused while Len does that not-laugh where he exhales sharply through his nose. “No. Miss West told Mick.” 

“What? _Iris_?” Barry exclaims. “How—what?” 

“They talk, apparently,” Lisa shrugs. “Mostly about cake. She follows his Instagram.” 

“ _Anyway,_ ” Len interrupts, pulling a small phone from his pocket with the dramatic flourish of a cat who is upset at having the attention taken away from him. “What if there was someone who’d watch her while you’re gone at your boring legitimate job?” 

“What?” Barry asks. “Really? Who—is this an actual _burner phone_? Real people use these?” 

Len lets out another not-laugh, and Barry sneaks a look up at him through his lashes, pleased. 

Blue chooses that moment to wriggle away from Barry and crash into Len in a completely tactless and uncoordinated ploy for his bootlaces. Barry chuckles as Len regards the puppy warily. Lisa snaps a picture of his face, causing him to give her a sideways glare that she summarily ignores.

“Just call the number programmed in this phone and someone you can trust will come and take care of her while you’re at work. Maybe not every day, but most of the time.” Len hands the phone to Barry, careful not to touch Blue, but just as careful not to throw her off balance as she tries valiantly to climb his leg, suddenly intent on the last of the sandwich he has in his hand. 

“Not a dog person?” Barry asks. 

“Not as such.” 

“Then why did you go and steal eighty-six of them?” 

Barry’s world is suddenly filled with Len’s blue eyes. The sharpness of them seems to catch the first glow of twilight and are really stupidly beautiful as he stares hard at Barry. He feels like that gaze is pointed, like Barry’s supposed to get something from that look, but he doesn’t. Not quite. 

“The money was too good,” Len finally answers. Lisa gives an undignified snort. 

“Still seems a little sketch,” Barry muses, tossing the flip phone back and forth in his hands. “Not to mention totally ridiculous that I need a burner phone for a _dog sitter_. Does this phone call you?” 

“Like I said, not a dog person, so no,” Len smirks. “Why? You asking for my number, Barry?” 

“I—uhm,” Barry stutters. And then another wrapped sandwich smacks Len in the shoulder. Another hits Barry in the side of his face, Blue careening after it so he has to juggle Beagle puppy and sandwich and beer. 

“I got you one for tomorrow,” Lisa blinks innocently at Barry’s startled look and Len’s murderous glare. “Because you never have anything to eat besides Pop Tarts and coffee, Sammy.” 

It’s dark by the time Lisa abandons them. Len walks Barry to his apartment, lugging the dog food and bag of treats and toys while Barry manages carrying the dog bed and Blue, who didn’t much like walking through the crowded sidewalks of the city. 

Len asks Barry if there’s any interesting cases, Barry mentions that he’s working on the art theft that made the paper today. 

“You don’t think that one’s me?” 

“No, too sloppy. They left behind the ropes and ladders they used, and I found a ton of DNA evidence. I’m also pretty sure at least one of them didn’t even wear gloves.” 

“It’s _embarrassing_ , truly,” Len nods. “And did you know that what they took—”

“Not even the most expensive pieces in the collection!” 

“How can you take the _Tableau Losangique II_ and completely leave behind _Yo, Picasso_?” Which leads Len to talk, in surprising detail, about how value is assigned to art according to the artist, the time period, and the historical significance. 

When they enter Barry’s apartment, Barry hands Len another beer ( _“shitty beer, Barry”_ ) and Len helps Barry set up the dog food, dishes, bed, and toys. And then he sits on the floor with Barry and Blue, the latter of which orbits away from them, exploring the apartment with her usual bravado, but returning often so Barry can rub her tummy. 

“You know,” Barry muses, playing with the label on his beer. He’d had two at the park with Lisa and Len, and with this one he’s starting to feel a little sleepy and floaty. He relaxes into it and smiles over at Len. “Maybe I am.” 

“Maybe you’re what?” 

“Asking for your number.” 

“And what would you do with that information, Barry?” 

“I don’t know—text you. Maybe call you.” 

“Yeah? For what?” And Len smiles. Not a smirk, not a mocking grin. But a small smile, pensive and waiting. Barry’s never seen a smile transform a face so completely and, in the end, he can’t really seem to help what he does next. 

“Maybe for something like this.” Barry leans in, unwary of sharp blue eyes, and lines their lips together. 

And they kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Here. Have almost 6K of pure "Barry talking to his friends." 
> 
> And, like. One line of "he actually kissed his love interest." 
> 
> I feel like my lack of planning has begun to show. I've actually had this done for close to two weeks now, but I sat on it waiting for something funnier or more dynamic to happen. I think my soul really just yearns for these characters just hanging out and being cute, though. I still enjoyed writing parts of this chapter. I hope you enjoyed reading it, too! 
> 
> Oh, yah. If you'd like, I'm also [over here on tumblr](https://wonderingtheblue.tumblr.com/). I don't actually post much (because. effort.), but I'm usually around if you want to chat or send me an ask. ;D

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [You Can Call Me Betty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480943) by [Tobyaudax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tobyaudax/pseuds/Tobyaudax)




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